People act like four years is a long time to take between albums—e.g. the case of Frank Ocean’s Blonde, the long gestating follow up to his very successful and critically lauded 2012 effort Channel Orange.
Maybe people were working themselves up into a tizzy over Blonde because there is a bit of an aloof mystique around Ocean as an artist and performer; maybe it’s because people thought the album was coming out in 2015 and it didn’t; but nearly every story w/r/t Blonde that I read online following its release began with something to the extent of “Frank Ocean’s Blonde, his first album IN FOUR YEARS…” in an effort to further drive the hype machine.
I mean, four years is still one presidential administration. It’s not really that long of a time period.
Six years, however, seems a little longer, and at first glance, it seems like it may be worth getting worked up over. Mostly because if you round up, you are close to a decade—so let’s do it: “The Radio Dept.’s Running Out of Love, their first album IN SIX YEARS, picks up where the group left off in the dark ages of 2010 on their breakthrough Clinging to A Scheme.”
And let’s just get one thing out of the way—Clinging to A Scheme was a breakthrough, at least in terms of introducing the Swedish duo to a much larger indie leaning American audience. One thing that really chaps my ass this “sponsored” or “suggested post” or whatever from some vinyl fetishist online store called Turntable Lab that I kept seeing in my Facebook feed, advertising a vinyl copy of the album in a post that reads “The Radio Dept.’s Clinging to A Scheme—so slept on…”
It’s like, no, I’m pretty sure that people fucking love this album, so no, it is not “slept on.”
The Radio Dept. mixes moody, dreamy aesthetics with a straightforward pop sensibility—a successful formula they demonstrated on singles like “Heaven’s on Fire” and “Never Follow Suit.” And it’s a balancing act they attempt to continue on Running Out of Love—a long delayed album that arrives after five years of near silence from the band.
They could never really quite build off the success Clinging to A Scheme was seeing stateside—the band cancelled an entire tour in support of it in early 2011, and save for releasing a few politically leaning singles here and there, I presumed that The Radio Dept. was all finished based on their lack of output.
As it turns out, in a statement that was released along with the news of the new album, the band was involved in some kind of legal battle with their label, Labrador Records. They lost their court case, but in the statement, it mentions they reached some kind of agreement and were inspired to begin making music again.
Picking up with those politically charged one-off singles, Running Out of Love is a politically leaning album that is fit for these uncertain times in which we live in here in the United States, as well as in the band’s native Sweden—where things are, apparently, just as bad, if not worse, according to a long read/interview the band gave with Pitchfork recently.
Running Out of Love is not a dramatic reinvention for The Radio Dept.’s sound.
It finds the band channeling its political ideals and dissatisfactions through old drum machines, 90s-era dance floor keyboard patterns, myriad synthesizers, and effect-heavy guitars to create, overall, a very reserved tension spread across ten tracks, that only occasionally bubbles over into something incredibly accessible to a casual or passing listen.
Despite its heavy messages against the establishment, I wouldn’t call Running Out of Love a “dark” album, but it is most certainly a dense album—there’s a lot going on musically within the layers that, as with the band’s previous work, have been mixed in such a way that everything winds up sounding a little flat, or antiquated, or chintzy. But that’s kind of the point, I think—isn’t it? Dusty sounding drum beats, cheap sounding keyboards, and of course, singer Johan Duncanson’s somewhat monotone vocals are buried low, giving almost every song a bit of a murky, muddled quality.
In the dark ages of 2010, I thought Clinging to A Scheme was an exciting album—specifically the high-energy songs like “Heaven’s on Fire,” or “This Time Around.” There isn’t a lack of excitement throughout Running Out of Love, (there are plenty of songs that have a fast, or more upbeat tempo) but in revisiting The Radio Dept. as an idea, in 2016, I’ve kind of come to the conclusion that this music is just slightly on the boring side.
Many of the songs on Running Out of Love are a little self-indulgent in their length and structure.
The album’s first single, “Occupied,” which apparently discusses their fallout with Labrador Records, is seven minutes long. Why? A bulk of it is just instrumental segments of programmed drumbeats and gloomy sounding keyboards that seem like they were ripped from the Angelo Badalamenti playbook. Later, the dreamy “Can’t Be Guilty” has an extended instrumental ending that causes the song to drag on a little longer than it maybe needed to.
The same thing happens to the funk-driven “Committed to The Cause,” which, at nearly six minutes, channels an early 90s kind of vibe in its groove—a sound the band explores elsewhere in the record with the near Depeche Mode levels of synth pop and song structure they reach for on “We Got Game.”
Running Out of Love isn’t a bad record; it just has the unfortunate distinction of being a kind of boring, meandering one.
The kind of record that I will more than likely not be returning to for subsequent listens any time soon. From start to finish, it sounds like The Radio Dept., and while many of the songs are connected by their politically slanted nature, the album suffers from a real lack of cohesion and focus.
Six years is a long time to be away, and the band was, somehow, able to hold my interest for enough of those years that I was legitimately excited about Running Out of Love; however, six years of silence may have proven not so much detrimental to The Radio Dept.’s momentum, but Running Out of Love does not sound like it’s the product of a rejuvenated band.
Rating: 2/5