Tag: The Radio Dept.

30 Songs That Blew My Mind (that you probably haven’t heard of) – Part 4

The posts are getting farther apart as I struggle to select that final 50%.

16. Bashling – Emperor X: My Emperor X story is a weird one and it starts with me meeting the man before the music. My friend, who worked at a community radio station at the time, was the obsessive fan and by the end of our adventure I had morphed into one as well. We were at the studio for an interview and in came a request for E-X to perform. Problem: we have no instruments on hand. The show goes into break as the four of us are scurry around this tiny room, tapping on floors, walls and furniture, looking for anything that could provide a beat. ‘Something hollow!’ – Chad Matheny/E-X specifies. I stumble upon a hollow panel in the wall and E-X smashes into it bare-handed. That afternoon in a tiny studio on the 9th floor of an old building in the Melbourne CBD, I watched the most beautiful, raw and honest live performance in the world.

The sheer emotion and heart and passion and love in E-X’s music hits you like a steel beam you can almost taste and, of the lot, its ‘Bashling’ that wrapped itself around my stony little heart. An oddity in the E-X catalogue, it speaks to me the loudest (or hits the hardest). Watch him perform this lonely, loveless song under a bridge in Glendale and you’ll understand why I’ve never known a performer more compelling.

17. Bayshore – Bleach Dream: We just met a few months ago and if it hadn’t been for DKFM, this album would have drifted right by leaving me none the wiser as it has nearly the entire shoegaze community because how else can you explain its absence from every best of list from 2017? It’s my own stupid and nearly criminal fault that I didn’t catch the aptly named Saudade sooner because it would have topped mine.

It feels almost wrong to have such a young track on this list, but the more I listen to ‘Bayshore’ and its reprise, ‘I Love You,’ the more I am convinced that it belongs here. It tastes of summer sunsets and teenage love. It’s charmingly simple but you’ll feel your heart drop they the way it would when you caught a glimpse of your inexplicable teenage crush, skipping a beat like it did when you received a text message you knew was from them on your 3310. If I miss out on making an end of year list for 2018, it’ll be because I was listening to ‘Bayshore’ all year long.

18. According to Plan – I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness: Why do love songs have to be sad to be beautiful? How can there be so much devastation in so few words? How can six strings sound so soul-crushingly plaintive, yet so stoic, yet so hopeful all at the same time? I had to turn to the stories of gods to explain all that ‘According to Plan’ is and all that it can be and even the most epic of sagas couldn’t capture what you feel when you hear ‘In a perfect world / the perfect place is with you / the truth is the world is without love.‘

19. Solera la Reina – Amusement Parks on Fire: One of only two bands in the world that can do no wrong (the other is No. 20 on this list). Find me a weak APOF track and I’ll… I guess we’re not friends any more then?

‘Solera La Reina’ is peak APOF – six minutes of perfection tucked away on an unassuming EP which is sort of analogous to how tucked away APOF were themselves at the time. I’ve struggled to find what I can say about this track beyond: it is beautiful. Not beautiful like a tableau is beautiful, but something more profound. It’s something to take your breath away and bring tears to your eyes and leave your hands trembling. Out of everything flawless that APOF have ever created, Solera La Reina is far and away the queen.

20. Freddie and the Trojan Horse – The Radio Dept.: Do you remember the feeling you’d get when a song you loved came on the radio or on TV and you’d will every cell in your body to full alertness so you could give it your undivided attention, soak every note, take in every vibration, and commit it to memory hoping to be able to play back in your head once it was over because you weren’t sure when you’d hear it again? You’d concentrate so furiously on that one song that by the end of it you’d feel like you hadn’t really listened to it at all. Do you remember that pure, childlike (because we were children) all-consuming love and obsession for just one track? ‘Freddie and the Trojan Horse’ is that feeling and when it plays you can’t imagine how a song more perfect could ever exist.

The Radio Dept. – Running Out Of Love

You can’t listen to The Radio Dept., least of all Running Out Of Love, in the absence of political context. To the more removed among us, Sweden is the portrait of bliss – idyllic surrounds, progressive laws, good-looking humans. It’s a role model for the rest of our feuding, collapsing nations. This is a country that has its shit together, passing laws against hate speech on the internet, while the rest of us struggle to revive our economies, feed our starving masses, and keep death tolls down to an acceptable minimum.

But all seems to be not so well in Sweden. In Sweden, if you want something done, get ‘Swedish Guns’. This recent release from the album is a biting commentary on the country’s weapons industry. The Radio Dept. have never been an aggressive band. You’re not likely to hear a chest-thumping call to arms on their tracks, but you will almost always hear the echoes of faded hope and regret. ‘Just take me by the hand/We’ll make them understand…’ they promise before falling back into the same jaded chorus ‘if you want something done/get Swedish Guns.’

Thematically, ‘Swedish Guns’ plays off the next track, ‘We’ve Got Game’ – a nightmarish depiction of racism and targeted oppression which flashes images of laser beams, SWAT teams and gunshots against the band’s trademark vintage Eighties synth backdrop. If there’s anything the Radio Dept. does well, it’s getting you to dance wildly to social commentary.

‘Committed to the Cause’ embodies this perfectly. It is the diamond in a sea of rubies. Driven by an uncharacteristically dense bassline and punctuated midway by a beautiful, swirling hook, its sheer hypnotism belies the nihilism beneath. “when our pain’s over, It’s someone else’s turn/No point in staying sober, if we’re gonna burn.” Musically it’s 4 am in the Hacienda. Emotionally, it’s dawn on the last day of your life.

Release ‘Teach Me to Forget’ as a pure pop single and it’ll climb to the top of the dance charts immediately with its popularly acceptable overtones of a tragic relationship (though it’s second nature to read a dystopian political narrative into the lyrics by this point) and synths pulled from every nightclub playlist in 2014.

Perhaps the secret to the Radio Dept.’s inimitable ambience is their science of memory. There’s not yet a band that can evoke the intangible nostalgia that the Radio Dept. do, but at least with this release we can be assured we don’t need there to be.

Originally published on Drowned in Sound