Bands will all the time sound like this: jangly and uncooked, infatuated with their very own youth, terribly and vaguely romantic, tripping over themselves of their haste to convey a botanic backyard’s price of full-bloom emotions. Radio DDR, the second album by Sharp Pins (the solo mission of Lifeguard’s Kai Slater) is a giddy blast of energy pop that understands, deeply, that the style’s solely purpose must be to make age-old emotions like love and longing sound thrilling and new. It succeeds and surpasses that purpose: Acquainted however finely tuned, it’s more likely to remind you of no matter music felt most romantic to you once you had been rising up. For me, that’s Royal Headache and the Beatles and Hunx and His Punx and Ladies; for you, possibly the Kinks or Cleaners From Venus or Alvvays. The album’s recombinant DNA is an asset—or, on the very least, not a hindrance—as a result of 20-year-old Slater can also be considered one of modern indie-rock’s sharpest pop songwriters, every of the file’s 14 songs containing its personal cosmos of pressing choruses and natty phrases and artfully scrawled riffs. Radio DDR earns its comparability factors, slamming you so arduous and so often with scream-a-long hooks that it appears like a greatest-hits assortment.
Along with his duties in Sharp Pins, Slater is a lynchpin of Chicago’s younger, fruitful guitar band scene: He runs a zine referred to as Hallogallo that shares its identify with a prolific DIY collective that additionally consists of Horsegirl, Put up Workplace Winter, and Slater’s different bands, Lifeguard and Dwaal Troupe. He’s additionally obsessive about youth tradition, and to learn him discuss its centrality in his life—“the one factor that I do know I can do on this planet is make youth areas,” he says—unlocks a layer of that means inside Radio DDR. These songs are about love, by and huge, however additionally they ache with the notion that sure elements of life will inevitably slip away. They lurch ahead urgently, like Slater is attempting to bottle the sensation of being younger earlier than the fountain runs dry.
Is it irritating that society and popular culture writ massive facilities round Being Younger? Perhaps, nevertheless it’s a neater capsule to swallow when it tastes this good. The halting boogie of “You Have A Approach” is a vortex of anxieties and boredoms that may boil down to 1 lyric—“Can I discover a time with you?” In the meantime, Slater chases “the seconds/I can’t droop anymore” on the frantic, anthemic storage barnstormer “Is It Higher.” “I Can’t Cease” seems like one thing Royal Headache’s Shogun might need made in his teenage bed room, and one repeated lyric makes this theme much more express: “I don’t wanna become old no extra.”
All of Radio DDR carries this sense of racing in opposition to the clock, which is a part of the (maybe oxymoronic) enchantment: Slater’s lyrics mirror the invincibility and assuredness of youth, however his melodies are shot by way of with the melancholy that comes with getting older and realizing that the infallibility of your late teenagers and early 20s is simply one other ephemeral feeling. Slater makes these emotions sound impossibly potent: The “ahh-ahh-ahh” on “Storma Lee” is wistful sufficient to trigger palpitations in even the sturdiest coronary heart; when he sings “If I used to be ever lonely/Oh, the way it’d tear me aside,” hitting these final three phrases with a glam swagger, you wish to snicker on the hubris and the thrill of all of it. This contradictory, lovestruck aura fills each nook of Radio DDR; it’s immensely gratifying to hear and do not forget that bands like Sharp Pins will hold striving to seize these ineffable emotions so long as individuals are having them. (Which is to say: endlessly.)
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