Bands will always sound like this: jangly and raw, infatuated with their own youth, terribly and vaguely romantic, tripping over themselves in their haste to convey a botanic garden’s worth of full-bloom feelings. Radio DDR, the second album by Sharp Pins (the solo project of Lifeguard’s Kai Slater) is a giddy blast of power pop that understands, deeply, that the genre’s only goal should be to make age-old feelings like love and longing sound thrilling and new. It succeeds and surpasses that goal: Familiar but finely tuned, it’s likely to remind you of whatever music felt most romantic to you when you were growing up. For me, that’s Royal Headache and the Beatles and Hunx and His Punx and Girls; for you, maybe the Kinks or Cleaners From Venus or Alvvays. The album’s recombinant DNA is an asset—or, at the very least, not a hindrance—because 20-year-old Slater is also one of contemporary indie-rock’s sharpest pop songwriters, each of the record’s 14 songs containing its own cosmos of urgent choruses and natty phrases and artfully scrawled riffs. Radio DDR earns its comparison points, slamming you so hard and so frequently with scream-a-long hooks that it feels like a greatest-hits collection.
In addition to his duties in Sharp Pins, Slater is a lynchpin of Chicago’s young, fruitful guitar band scene: He runs a zine called Hallogallo that shares its name with a prolific DIY collective that also includes Horsegirl, Post Office Winter, and Slater’s other bands, Lifeguard and Dwaal Troupe. He’s also obsessed with youth culture, and to read him talk about its centrality in his life—“the only thing that I know I can do in the world is make youth spaces,” he says—unlocks a layer of meaning within Radio DDR. These songs are about love, by and large, but they also ache with the notion that certain parts of life will inevitably slip away. They lurch forward urgently, like Slater is trying to bottle the feeling of being young before the fountain runs dry.
Is it frustrating that society and pop culture writ large centers around Being Young? Maybe, but it’s an easier pill to swallow when it tastes this good. The halting boogie of “You Have A Way” is a vortex of anxieties and boredoms that can boil down to one lyric—“Can I find a time with you?” Meanwhile, Slater chases “the seconds/I can’t suspend anymore” on the frantic, anthemic garage barnstormer “Is It Better.” “I Can’t Stop” sounds like something Royal Headache’s Shogun might have made in his teenage bedroom, and one repeated lyric makes this theme even more explicit: “I don’t wanna get older no more.”
All of Radio DDR carries this feeling of racing against the clock, which is part of the (perhaps oxymoronic) appeal: Slater’s lyrics reflect the invincibility and assuredness of youth, but his melodies are shot through with the melancholy that comes with getting older and realizing that the infallibility of your late teens and early 20s is just another ephemeral feeling. Slater makes these feelings sound impossibly potent: The “ahh-ahh-ahh” on “Storma Lee” is wistful enough to cause palpitations in even the sturdiest heart; when he sings “If I was ever lonely/Oh, how it’d tear me apart,” hitting those last three words with a glam swagger, you want to laugh at the hubris and the excitement of it all. This contradictory, lovestruck aura fills every corner of Radio DDR; it’s immensely gratifying to listen and remember that bands like Sharp Pins will keep striving to capture these ineffable feelings as long as people are having them. (Which is to say: forever.)
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