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Dusted Reviews
Artist: Radar Eyes Album: Radar Eyes Label: Hozac Review date: Apr. 11, 2012 |
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Spiritualized, Spacemen 3, Nuggets, Velvet Underground, sitars, psychedelia, The Byrds, reverb (a lot of it), Mike Sniper (this guy can’t not get brought up), Chicago, Brooklyn, the last 10 years in indie rock/pop music/indie-pop/punk/garage/garage-punk, and Crystal Stilts. Definitely Crystal Stilts. We could waste a lot of time talking about Radar Eyes and finding sentences to talk about their “sound,” but it’s much easier to boil down the boring part into the buzzwords that tell you everything you already need to know.
So what more is there to talk about? Repetition, and the new lows (or highs, if you’re that kind of person) that Radar Eyes brings to it. This is not to be confused with redundancy. Paragraph one has already made that point. What I’m talking about is how these songs repeat themselves until their structures reveal themselves as completely arbitrary, looping four bars for indefinite (or infinite, if you’re that kind of person) periods that have no real form except for a start and an end point. “In Love” is the prime example as track No. 1, but is by no means the only culprit. Radar Eyes is somehow able to ameliorate tensions in the debate around form and formlessness, even if they can’t take the step past mere annoyance to a more zen state, or, more importantly, genre itself.
Because when you get down to the most basic point, the biggest problem with Radar Eyes is their total commitment to generic exercise. So little has to be said about them as a band because they say so little themselves, adhering to a tried and true triteness that is the very definition of safe. Their greatest blunder as a band isn’t that they aren’t good enough to be considered a worthy or remarkable act. It’s that they didn’t even bother giving us a reason to be bothered about it. Which makes me wonder, why bother in the first place?
By Evan Hanlon
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