The Radio Dept. certainly took their time with this one. Clinging to a Scheme, their third album released since the band’s formation in 1995, was announced almost two years ago for a fall 2008 release and then delayed every six months until this week, when it finally surfaced. Fortunately, unlike other records plagued by protracted schedules, this one’s not terrible nor rendered irrelevant by delays a la Chinese Democracy. In fact, it’s quite excellent; it’s without a doubt the band’s most accessible and immediate album, and one that perfectly captures the sensations and moods of a rained-out beach party. More than ever before, the band has songs to keep up with its textures, and unlike most worlds defined by dense guitars and deliberately broken-sounding drum machines it’s one worth revisiting.
In reshaping its dream-pop, the band draws from a whole lot of recent trends in Swedish music, almost all of which benefit them. While the usual nods to 1980s British guitar pop and shoegaze (think Factory Records, think the most tolerable moments of Sarah Records, think My Bloody Valentine) are all over, there are nods to the Balearic revival and the Gothenburg bands at the forefront of it all over the place, especially on “Memory Loss” and standout “Heaven’s On Fire;” the former sports basslines indebted to Studio and the latter draws from almost every act on the often-stellar Sincerely Yours label (The Tough Alliance, jj, Air France), working house pianos, samples taken from interviews with Sonic Youth frontman Thurston Moore, orchestral hits and a pretty great chorus into three and a half minutes. The material most indebted to post-punk is rarely austere, given depth through its layered production and Johan Duncanson’s vocals, which stick to a small range and do everything they can within that space to deliver decent melodies, at least half of which stick.
Duncanson is still a total sad sack, though. While there are no references to Jandek anywhere and no songs about exes’ new boyfriends and the fact that they have the worst taste in music, there’s a whole lot of melancholy and second-person pronouns, most of which don’t stand on their own. In spite of this, they never derail the atmosphere or sentiment of the music behind them, nor are they mixed so loudly as to make them more than another instrument across the record. By the time the album hits its closer, “You Stopped Making Sense,” even the simplest sentiments: and they don’t get much further than how much he wants that addressee around: seem full of purpose, and given that he gets that far, he’s clearly doing something right.
Though there are hundreds of bands mining this sound or some permutation of it, the Radio Dept. never confine themselves to one specific set of ideas, and they’re better because of it. Here’s to hoping it doesn’t take them another four years to follow this one up, even if that time did yield such vast improvements.
