After 2010’s sunny and spectacular Clinging to a Scheme, Sweden’s The Radio
Dept. finally acquired deserved attention and a wider audience. Hopefully new
listeners explored the bands prior discography, including Pet Grief and the exquisite lesser matters Lesser Matters. Released in 2003, this album comprises 13 songs
concerning lost romance, life’s uncertainties, and the emotions that arise from
reliving a specific time of life. Lesser
Matters does all of this with a shoe-gazey sound that drips with reverb and
a shimmering haze underscoring the entire album. Kicking off with Too Soon, a
simmering song that gently paves the entrance for this majestic album, which
fades into the quick hitting guitars and fastest paced track on the album,
Where Damage Isn’t Already Done.
One of most powerful 4 track efforts I have ever heard
begins with the aching 1995, a song that clearly means a great deal to the
band, as they reminisce and drift away back to better times, better loves in
the mid 90’s “1995 is missing buses, It’s walking 15 miles to see your love, It’s
knowing you’re alive through all the fuzz, It’s never coming down from going
up. And though I’m happier now I always long somehow, back to 1995.” We all
share that feeling of nostalgia, of hoping against hope that the world can
somehow come together as it was when every day meant waking up in a pure state
of bliss. Following this devastatingly gorgeous
track, comes Against the Tide, a tune that embraces fighting off the chains and
always moving upstream, against what everyone else wants and simply enjoying
the gifts that two people can share with one another.
Stranger Things Will Happen is sung with a female
vocalist, the only track to do so, asking an important question about the odd
occurrences that happen in our lives: “Today was a pretty day, no disappoints
no expectations on your whereabouts, And Did I let you go? Did it finally show
that strange things will happen if you let them?” The organ underlying these
words enhances the significant emotional tones and truly grasps those
inexplicable moments that cause us great joy and pain. Finally, Your Father closes this wondrous
segment in Lesser Matters,
acknowledging the pain of a lost love, especially one that was unwanted by a
family member: “We were only kids when we first laid eyes on each other,
Everything great but you should have warned me about your father, you finding
someone else was a real blow, but will defend me, I’m drinking every day but
try to behave the same way I did before, but It’s oh so hard.” This song lists
just over 4 minutes, and the tension involved drags the listener into the song
and an instant later the music ends, leaving us wondering if the character was
able to ever recover. Closing track Lost
and Found begins with a roar of static and a gentle voice crooning “But now
when all is changed around, I’m buried in the lost and found.” A light guitar
over the static slowly fades into silence, ending this terrific album and an
epic emotional journey through this phenomenal band’s debut album.
