Meet Radiohearts!

Due to new developments in my working life that will be demanding large amounts of my time over the next few weeks, I have decided that there will be no F & L posts during the month of September. I just won't have the time to do a proper job of listening to and reviewing new music, so I'm going to take a month off and see you all back here in October. I figured, then, that I should leave you all with something really, really awesome!

If you've been following my writings over many years - or even just in recent years - you'll know exactly what I mean when I say Radiohearts are "my" kind of band. As a young man, I used to go to record shows and vinyl shops and dig for any obscure 7" I could find from '77-'79 that looked like it might be punk rock or power pop. Even though those two scenes were supposedly very different, to my tastes they were closely related. Punks in 1979 might have wished to nuke The Knack, but in the '90s I had no problem putting "Good Girls Don't" or The Nerves' "Hanging On The Telephone" on the same mixed tape with songs from the Buzzcocks and Generation X. The Long Beach trio Radiohearts are a band born of that thrill of finding some rare power pop or punk single from that golden age of music. They marry classic new wave and power pop sounds to the melodic side of '70s punk, and their new EP "Nothing At All" could genuinely pass for one of those rare records referenced above. And while there are a lot of bands out there doing the '77 punk/powerpop thing, the cool thing to me is that Radiohearts don't sound like just another clone of the style. They have their own sound - highlighted by strong vocals from Ed Stuart and Mike Yager's nimble bass work. Here they've delivered four high quality songs - all around or under two minutes in length. I could easily slide any of these tracks onto one of my old mixed tapes! If you like upbeat, high energy punk music with a strong emphasis on hooks and melodic song structures, this EP is going to be hard to beat. Check it out!



-L.R.

http://radiohearts.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Radiohearts/270582719083