XL Recordings – REKD 41
Like many a cult artist, the Radio Dept have frequently proven their own
worst enemies. Take it from their label boss, Johan Angergård of
Stockholm’s Labrador Records:
There’s been fights and threats regarding contracts. They’ve cancelled
more interviews than all the other bands I’ve worked with altogether.
They are unworldly time optimists (they can miss a deadline by three
years). They’ve demanded – and received – so much advances that we
haven’t been able to pay our bills. I’ve had to bribe them with drugs to
persuade them to talk to selected parts of the press. They’ve been
soundly pissed off when a colour of their artwork didn’t turn out
exactly the shade they intended … the story goes on.”
Now consider that these complaints were listed in the liner notes to the
band’s 2010 singles and rarities collection Passive Aggressive (in case
you’re wondering why Angergård bothers releasing the Radio Dept’s music
at all, elsewhere he hails them as “fantastic songwriters and almost
geniusly wayward producers”), and you begin to appreciate that a kind of
glorious dysfunctionality is written into these painfully shy lo-fi
electro dreampop Swedes’ DNA. That and an integrity few other groups
could claim to possess.
A rotating cast of musicians based around long-term friends Johan
Duncanson and Martin Larsson (occasional third member Daniel Tjäder also
plays with Korallreven), the Radio Dept originally hail from the
southern Swedish university town of Lund. Their name, taken from a local
petrol station turned radio repair shop, has been used by Duncanson
since 1995. But the band’s noisy-melodic signature sound only really
came to be with a string of EPs from 2000’s Against the Tide through to
2003’s Pulling Our Weight, each of them self-produced – like all of the
Radio Dept’s music to date – by Duncanson and Larsson at their home
studio.
There’s true magic in these early formative toyings with wonky drum
machines, gauzy synths and guitars soaked in fuzz and reverb. Only
semi-discernible through an enigmatic cloak of ambient drones and tape
hiss, Duncanson’s softly sung words speak to his stubborn iconoclasm and
bored disillusionment with normative power structures, be they within
the music industry, politics or relationships. The pseudo-shoegazey,
feedback- and distortion-torn Against the Tide and Why Won’t You Talk
About It? – each recorded initially as demos, now firm fan favourites –
are so overdriven it feels like your speakers can barely take it...