Radio 4 - Gotham!

Sure, about every review from here to the subterranean dancefloors where Radio 4 submerge their unformulaic pop beneath transcendent keyboards and fractured guitar attritions has accredited their band’s aural infrastructure on Mission of Burma and Gang of Four. But, Radio 4 have seen the future and they simple have no time to dawdle on past Brit-trends – this eclectic quintet is the voyeur of next millennia noise. Gotham!, Radio 4’s bustling sophomore effort, itches with ice-pick-like guitar textures and pounds with floor rippling bass groovenetics. It rocks enough to appeal to the emanation of new school post-punkers, jives enough to be dished out on the dancefloor and agitates enough to cause an invigorating cerebrum-riot in the pensive minded. And, frankly, Radio 4 is just plain cool enough to be detected by anyone with sensible musical intuition. Now disregard Radio 4 with any antecedents; for they are the wax that puts the iridescent glow on all the spacecrafts of the future. Spiking the palatable punch bowl of reversionary disco aesthetics and retro new wave with guitars that resemble shards of glass; the strident and luminous opener, “Our Town,” zealously fills the awkward gray void between key gnashers, club goers and static distortion-aires. The instant that this track lashes out in nihilistic keyboard fury, you realize Radio 4’s auditory earthquakes do in fact pulse to familiar beat; but that is to the beat only heard in the space stations that orbit Mars or in the catacombs of a dance party on Venus. In earthly terms, this means the fun and new wave nostalgia that perspires from the dancefloor deviants in the Faint or Primal Scream’s XTRMNTR disc – the modern Magellan of electronica-guitar exploration. Routered with guitars that stick to your mind like a hyperbolic case of static cling and anchored by bottom heavy synths, Gotham! concentrates its catharsis upon the cornerstone of life. Throwing out the fabrication that any commix of electro-fusion has to be filled under the “cold” and “detached” tag, Radio 4 bombard the sweat drenched dancefloor with breakbeats brimming with vivacity and animated icebergs of white noise that pounce with fierce life. Radio 4 should be the next signal transmitted to reach alien life because, at the very least, Gotham! is going to be charted as the first intergalactic album to rock all forms of life – despite what cosmos you call fly back to at the end of the day. [www.r4ny.com]