Adding two different genres of music together to describe a new unnamed third is a common trope when trying to describe the sound of a band. In the case of Radiation City, whose music exists at a fascinating intersection of time and space, you almost have no choice. So here goes: their new album Animals in The Median sounds a bit sixties tropicalia pop meets psychedelic seventies rock mixed with some percolating beats of the eighties and then sprinkled with the nineties post-modern sound of Stereolab. Got all that?
The members of Radiation City play these timeless sounds with a listener’s ear, giving each other the space to create some really lovely textures and exquisitely crafted melodies, and all with a dark and beautiful edge. The twelve songs in total are both sad and uplifting, a contradiction that makes sense when you realize that the band hails from Portland, Oregon where we have the most incredible bright summers and some unusually long dark winters.
Album opener, Zombies could have been written in either 1985 or 1965, reminding me of Fun Boy Three or Banarama, thankfully without the eighties drum sound. Foreign Bodies takes you on tour of early seventies AM pop with rising harmonies and syncopated drumming, but it never goes saccharine even as the song rises to a climax. Wary Eyes shift gears to a reverb-laden space where Galaxie 500 would feel right at home, and the vocals are equally haunting. Buckminterstfullerene sounds like early Pink Floyd or the Beach Boys, until the bridge veers into a piano bar stomp that almost sounds like a Glam rock anthem. Slightly muddy production keeps the song from sounding overly pop, though. In fact the whole record has a hazy quality that keeps the listener at a slight distance, sounding like sonic transmissions from a ghostly past.
There are a lot of contemporary indie bands milking the 60s-70s seventies psych-pop vein in a seemingly ironic way that sounds transient and disposable to my ears. Radiation City have their roots in an eclectic musical past, but the music they’re creating shows a band very much in command of their own sound, a band building for the future.
