What a nice review of Radiation City’s recent Seattle show at Sound on the Sound.
This month we had the pleasure of bringing up Radiation City to Seattle for the first time and I’d by lying if after their set I didn’t seriously think to myself “Next PDX Obsession.” I also asked myself “Most Exciting New Portland Band?” and for so many reasons. Each song is an opportunity for the foursome to feverishly conjure a dense but vaguely romantic pop mood, led by keys and vox of Lizzy Ellison and impressive textural guitar of Cameron Spies (formerly of San Francisco’s Raised by Robots). Lest we think their recorded work is too perfectly constructed to be even possible outside of the studio, in the Columbia City Theater’s capable hands they met the record’s expansive bar easily, to the point of making it a shame that such a high-fidelity record is only at the moment issued on cassette tape. Ellison legitimately belts it, often surfacing from a hazy and understated melodic position to bring the song’s biggest moments home. Never staying under one umbrella for too long, Radiation City’s songs, and by extension their general aesthetic, can’t be summed up in a single word. Guitar and rhythm textures are changing minute to minute, and song to song; the mood is in perpetual subtle shift. Each track is a developed whole unto-itself, different from what came before it, and different still from what follows. As far as I’m concerned their adventurous new record The Hands that Take You is a pop achievement that constitutes the most ambitious and modern sound to come out of Portland since Nurses dropped Apple’s Acre on us.
- Sound on the Sound, 4/8/2011
Thanks Josh Lovseth!
