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Monday, January 11, 2021

The Radio Dept. - (2004) Why Won't You Talk About It?

 

 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...

White Poppy - (2017) The Pink Haze Of Love

 

Self-released ‎– none 

White Poppy's latest EP marks something of a departure for Crystal Dorval's oft-titled "dream pop" project. Ironically, Pink Haze of Love clears some of the "haze" that masked her previous releases and positions Dorval as a new age singer songwriter. The album weaves through 8 songs that deal in matters of love, limerence and heartbreak in an uncharacteristically forward manner. Dorval's hypnotic guitar circles its way around warm, droning synths while her lyrics and voice take centre stage for the first time. The result is a short but sweet meditation, sung from a candlelit cabin, that echoes over a calm tide.