Review: Radio Moscow at Launchpad

I had the opportunity to catch Radio Moscow at the Launchpad on Friday night.  In spite of their relative obscurity, they are musicians of the first class.  They play a loud, distorted, and slightly psychedelic blues rock that calls to mind modern acts like The Black Keys or The White Stripes just as well as classic bands like Led Zeppelin or Cream.  Perhaps it’s fitting that the first show that I actually made it to the Launchpad to see has such a retro sound.  However, I find there’s a visceral immediacy to this style of music that is lost in a lot of the over-produced, over-orchestrated newer styles.  This is not to say that all new music is bad or all old music is good.  However, there is a cult of innovation among music critics and fans that holds that new music, to be good, must be new and revolutionary.  However, there is a long, glorious musical tradition to be maintained, and bands like Radio Moscow serve as torch-bearers for older styles.  The way forward in music has (almost) always been built on the traditions of the past.  But I digress…

Radio Moscow is made up of Parker Griggs and a rotating cast of bassists and drummers.  Zach Anderson played bass and Cory Berry played drums at the show we saw.  But, in the same way that there would be no White Stripes without Jack White, it is plain to see that there would be no Radio Moscow without Parker Griggs.  LIke White, Griggs leaves his mark on every moment of the band’s music.  Griggs writes the band’s material, plays lead guitar, sings, and plays the drums on the albums.  He is completely aware of the full sound of his band at all times, and his perfectionism both helps and hinders his performance.  Since he has evidentially held his other band members to such high standards, the band’s music is always amazing, whether live or recorded.  He tuned his guitar after every song, and he knew immediately when the head on the bass drum started to tear.  When the bass drum was rendered unusable, he ended the set immediately, saying the music would sound terrible without it.  It certainly would not sound as good, but the rest of the band was good enough that I would have been willing to listen to a set in which the drums did not play at all.

Despite the short set and the reasonably small crowd, I was impressed by how many people I saw carrying out records at the end of their show.  I don’t think I saw a single CD sold, but I would not be surprised if everybody in attendance bought both of the albums they had on vinyl.

Soul Vaccination

As Sasha Frere-Jones points out nicely in the latest New Yorker, there’s something of a soul revival going on.  Frere-Jones has a hard time taking it seriously. Like a lot of people, he really values music that breaks new ground, so any revisitation of older styles strikes him more as gratuitous fandom than legitimate musical expression.  There is a certain validity to that argument: people remember the Bachs, the Beethovens, and The Beatles because they created new modes of musical expression.  Their music holds the imagination precisely because it was so new and so revolutionary.

All that being said, the claim that backward-looking music is of lesser value rings false to me.  We remember Beethoven because his music is still played in concert halls, and The Beatles still top the charts on Last.fm.  Beethoven also idolized Bach, from a century earlier.  Even the Beatles’ White Album featured songs like “Rocky Raccoon” and “Honey Pie“, which were as retro as “Revolution 9” was avant-garde.

There have been many revivals of different types of music, and many good bands have emerged from them over the years.  The garage rock revival spawned bands like The White Stripes and The Hives, while the swing revival launched the careers of the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.  These bands all started looking backward, but have since developed their own unique sounds.  In some ways, they are more revolutionary for drawing their sound from a different source than what is popular at the time.  The songs of Motor City are some of the most memorable and most tuneful in the history of American popular music.  A return to that style of sound could prove to be a shot in the arm for the ailing music industry.  Frere-Jones admits in his article that he was perhaps too hasty in dismissing the work of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings.  For my part, I’ll be keeping my eyes, as well as my ears, on the soul revival.

Here are a few videos to put this sound in your ears.  Notice that their visual language is as retro as their sound.

This second video, as you can probably tell from the title, is a bit … blue.  Mind your speakers if there are sensitive ears about.