If one were to look at the entirety of the Radar Bros. musical output, a trend may begin to appear. Beginning with their self-titled effort in 1996 on through The Fallen Leaf Pages, their most recent release in March of 2005, the Radar Bros. have created a genre all their own, and each effort has proven to be more dense and wickedly traumatic than the last making the avid follower see a kind of funeral procession of growth within the band that has, in this most recent album, come to fruition.
Defined by fluid guitars, hovering synthesizers and heavy-handed piano playing, the Radar Bros. have been trying to produce a body of work that tells a continuous story concerning the trivialities of life and death and the dark secrets that surround them and in The Fallen Leaf Pages, this story seemingly takes the most lucidly morbid turn to date. Beginning with “Faces of the Damned”, the album takes you through thirteen songs that deal with the fragility of life and its many crushing defeats and regrets as seen through the eyes of the ghosts that roam freely from beyond the grave. Band leader Jim Putnam’s softly placed vocals engulf you in a blanket of serenity that turns out to be an ever tightening constraint that locks the door behind you and does not allow you to leave. This is an album that demands solitude and light depravity for maximum enjoyment, its lyrical content and instrumentation so earthy and broad that both natural and man-made light sources could burn away its meaning and leave much left to be desired.
There are many critics out there who believe that the Radar Bros. are a one trick pony, that every album sounds exactly the same and that the hooks are few and far between. This reviewer has a different way of looking at it. The Radar Bros. never had the intention of writing a top ten single or trying to garner an adoring public through light-hearted riffs and jargon laced lyricism. The Fallen Leaf Pages is a wonderful example of this. Now, sure, there are some definite hooks involved (Just listen to “Papillon” with its heroin induced rendition of Beach Boys song structure and its eerie story concerning butterflies and beetles, or maybe even “Government Land” which is as close to a punk song as the Radar Bros. may ever come), but Jim Putnam, bassist Senon Williams and drummer Steve Goodfriend are trying to relay an epic story to their listeners, and as we all know, no novel worth its weight in history can have just one exceptionally good chapter, it needs description and evidence and surrounding characters in order to work. The Radar Bros. understand this fact indepthly, thus why they are one of the few bands to still believe in the importance of the album in songwriting. You could play all of their albums one after the other and find a certain cohesion that brings their atmospheres together.
The Fallen Leaf Pages is an amalgam of twisted fairy tales and jarring guitar work that layers itself beautifully over each track, playfully treading water over their verse/chorus structure and turning it inside out on occasion with the mere twist of a volume knob. Its dark poetry creates a mental image of what it might feel like to die by way of drowning, horrifyingly combining the pain of an oxygen free environment with the supposed euphoria that follows when one realizes that all hope is lost and the brain can finally be allowed to let go. |