The Radio Dept. - Clinging to a Scheme

Artist: The Radio Dept.

Album: Clinging to a Scheme

Record label: Labrador

Rating: 4

There is something to be said for being worth the wait and with Clinging to a Scheme, their third album since they first came on the scene in the 1990s, The Radio Dept. seem to be making a case for the adage. Clinging to a Scheme comes after four long years of frustrating anticipation since the Swedish band’s 2006 album Pet Grief with it’s claims to be influenced by “minimalist post-punk, krautrock, repetitive motorik beat and ambient noise”. For the uninitiated, The Radio Dept. is a fairly conventional indie pop outfit with glazes of electronic soundscape. And yes, the influences only preempt the peculiarity of the 10 track long record with hard to deconstruct layers of guitar riffs, overlapped with speech samples and Saint Etienne like dance pop that the albums has to offer. WithClinging to a Scheme, The Radio Dept gives us an album that, in all likelihood, will turn into a cult offering in a decade. The shimmering clarity of Heavens on Fire is echoed throughout the album as it opens with Domestic Scene, the melancholy lyrics are well juxtaposed with the consistently cheery music on the record. Tracks like This Time Around, David and A Token of Gratitude – even as it borders on the histrionic – emerge in new layers on each spin. A long time in the waiting as it may have been, the band delivers a high fidelity, textured album – with The Radio Dept.’s trademark dreamlike ambiance –that will continue to unravel its myriad layers with each listen.

Dum Dum Girls - I Will Be

From a while back, but I quite liked the album. 


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Artist: Dum Dum Girls

Album: I Will Be

Record Label: Sub-pop

Rating: 3.5 stars

The Dum Dum Girls – their name a clever take on the name of an Iggy Pop album called Dum Dum Boys – started out in 2008 as singer Dee Dee Penny’s (real name Kirstin Gundred) solo project. Since then they’ve released a home recorded CDR and a 12” EP. The now four-piece garage pop band has just released their first studio album titled I Will Be, all of eleven songs. The Dum Dum Girls, in their previous recordings, took low fidelity 60’s girl band brand of pop and a cocktail of catchy lyrics and terrific harmonies.  This time around, by buffing up the band with three other members, including Frankie Rose from their suffix-sake girl-group Vivian Girls, Dee Dee has – almost fiercely – turned the Dum Dum Girls into a bonafide rockband. I Will Be was originally slated to be an album about a woman in prison, but in the final product has only one track that keeps to the theme – Jail La La, released as a single earlier this year. Oh Mein Me, sung in German, and a delicate rendering of Sonny and Cher’s Baby Don’t Go, are irrefutably hip with vocals that easily shuttle between fierce, coy and mysterious. The record’s production by Richard Gottehrer is the perfect foil to Dee Dee’s lyrics and the girl’s harmonies, creating mature and latered pop pleasures. 

Morcheeba - Blood Like Lemonade

A review I wrote for the newspaper I work with.


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Artist: Morcheeba
Album: Blood Like Lemonade
Label: Play It Again Sam
Rating: 4 stars

Morcheeba is often referred to as the music to which one would escape the “Decade from Hell”. Their carefree yet decadent sound when they started off in the mid-1990s rightfully earned them this reputation. Syke Edwards’ vocals had defined the band’s sound with an almost ethereal quality. Seven years after she quit the ensemble – and seven years of fading fortunes for the Godfrey Brothers, incidentally – Edwards returns to the band in their latest release Blood Like Lemonade, and it’s almost like they’re making up for the last two albums they put out. There is a  feeling of the lost years being retold, in both their laid back musicality and in Edwards’ breezy vocal renditions. The opening track Crimson takes one back to the late 1990s and is the perfect welcome wagon for Edwards, even if it’s slow burn-like quality makes one wonder if it’d be more at home somewhere in the middle of the record instead. Even Though might not be one of the album’s highlights, but it makes for a good lead-in to the title track Blood For Lemonade. The lingering vocal quality Edwards brings back to Morcheeba’s music seems very at home in the album with the light pacing. Clear picks for favourites on  the album have to be Mandala, I Am The Spring and Recipe For Disaster, with that familiar dreamy ambience that makes this – in typical Morcheeba fashion – perfect for a lazy summer day.  

My first week in Sofia, a small village in Northern Kenya, left me entirely confounded by the number of people who were “sick” around me. I heard people talk about so-and-so being sick. I heard the pastor ask the gathering at Sunday mass if anyone was “sick” and needed praying for. I saw men and women in the congregation raise their hands, and lower their heads. I met orphans who were “sick”. How did their parents die? I asked, in all my naiveté. They were sick, I was told. Then I saw a “sick” man die in a hospital bed. That’s when I understood what being sick meant around here. The young doctor under whose watch the old ailing man we had driven to the hospital – my host being one of the very few individuals with a car in the area – had died explained it to me. He shot me a baffled look and said “AIDS” in a drab tenor, one that hadn't yet transformed entirely into the unaffected, disinterested monotone that many of his seniors projected.

The man had come into his clinic a few months ago, complaining of illness after illness. Saying he had had no relief from his flickering health for the last two years, or maybe even a little more. The young doctor knew, in his gut, what ailed the man. His blood culture confirmed the suspicions – the man was HIV +ve. He went on to, as he has been trained to do of course, advise a course of treatment and a prescription of medication the man should immediately be put on. Turning to the wife, he suggested, in much the same breath, that she had better get tested, too. The thanked him for his advice and got on a bus that would take them home. They travelled the five kilometres or so in complete silence.

And that same silence would haunt them till their last moments together. That same silence will hold on to her desperately even after he leaves. Soon, she’ll start showing signs, getting sick. Unless one of the many churches has changed its view on the disease that must not be named by then and decides to get her help in procuring the medicines she so urgently needs. That silence will be her sanctuary when she’s rejected by her own parents, widowed and orphaned in the same breath. It will be her defiance as she sits, week after week, in church, dodging callous whispers about her husband, his other wife and her only inheritance from him – the sickness. It will be her fuel as she spends night and day and everything in between trying to get that one acre of land to cough up a few kernels for her to feed her family. It will be her regret when she puts her son to work when he should be put through school instead, partly because she can’t afford it and partly because she needs an extra hand to feed the mouths looking at her, every waking moment.

Her part in this losing battle might be mute, but it’s on no account silent, like her life.