[Excerpt from a review of a piece on Radiation City]
The Guardian Radiation City Friday 29 January 2016
http://www.theguardian.com/music/201...ion-city-no-88
Fleetwood who? This US four-piece comprise two couples who have used their broken relationships to create an album of lush, synthed-up melodrama
Hometown: Portland, Oregon.
The lineup: Cameron Spies (guitar, vocals), Elisabeth Ellison (vocals, keyboards), Matt Rafferty (bass, vocals), Patti King (vocals, keyboards, bass), Dasha Shleyeva (drums).
The background: Radiation City have been around for a little while, operating in America and largely ignored in the UK. They’re so good they start making you believe something’s not quite right: are this group simply the victims of bad luck, poor distribution or some such music industry inconsequentiality that can, in fact, end up stymieing an artist’s career?
One of the possible problems – but one that they may have turned to their advantage – is that the band contain one or more couples, and one or more of those couples has fallen apart. Now, this could become grist to their mill. It worked pretty well for Fleetwood Mac, not just in terms of sales (40m and counting for Rumours alone) but in the melancholy grain of the unimpeachable melodies and the players’ determination to use the album as a document of their unravelling.
Their latest album, Synesthetica, certainly sounds as though they have channelled their inner Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, Christine and John McVie, tune-wise if not in terms of therapeutic confession, because it is an absolute stormer. We’ve only just received it, and hardly had a chance to absorb it all and go into the lyrical detail, so it is too early to tell whether they have just been galvanised into action by the behind-scenes turmoil or whether they actually spill the beans in the songs. Are there any Don’t Stops or Go Your Own Ways? We shall see. Meanwhile, Radiation City’s knack – already demonstrated on their previous album, Animals in the Median (2013) – for creating shiny, hummable, lavish space-age bachelor pad retro-futurist indie exotica has, if anything, improved here.
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“It was honest and unafraid,” Cameron Spies and Elisabeth Ellison, the Buckingham-Nicks of the piece, have said of the conditions during the sessions for Synesthetica, so-called because of Ellison’s tendency to see specific colours when she hears different musical sounds. It certainly doesn’t lack for swirl. Members of Unknown Mortal Orchestra and producer John Vanderslice (Spoon, Death Cab For Cutie) were employed, but really, you could have told us John Barry and Smokey Robinson were involved, such is the sense of heightened drama and atmospheric grandeur. There’s a song called Butter which, inauspicious title notwithstanding, really is the James Bond theme of your dreams.
We’d already been impressed by their older material. Foreign Bodies made us think of Stereolab if they were more into Motown than Marxism, and Stutter recalled the Human League in MOR tear-jerker mode. But the songs on Synesthetica make them sound like demos for the real thing. Radiation City are clearly super-smart (we’re talking about a band who drop phrases like “cultural constructs” without blinking), and they have evidently mastered numerous pop idioms, but they never stint when it comes to investing their music with real emotion. A track from the album called Fancy Cherries, such is Ellison’s rarefied coo and the arrangement’s itchy glowbo blow, sounds like Liz Fraser of Cocteau Twins auditioning for the role of the protagonist in a Ronnie Spector biopic. The colour purple, in case you wondered.