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A gorgeous, swoonsome album that electrifies and stimulates in all the right places.
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UncutA palatial record. [Mar 2009, p.89]
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MojoFor Radio Wars, producer Dan Grech-Marguerat has opened out their sound, but the atmosphere of intrigue remains. [Apr 2009, p.98]
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Radio Wars demands its listeners heed that siren song, and it's truthfully hard to resist.
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Based solely on its musical sensibilities and lyricism one couldn’t say Radio Wars was a more mature effort than its predecessor. But given that it indicates its creators’ comfort in their being, it certainly sounds grown up.
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Too often on Radio Wars, velvet-voiced singer Juanita Stein seems content to hover around a handful of notes, and that makes it hard to distinguish this stuff from similarly styled fare by the Duke Spirit or Doves.
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Sometimes wars are won with persistence and numbers alone, after all. And in any case, when you're cruising along in a pleasure craft as nice and reliable as this one, it's all right to tread a little water.
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They hail from sunny Sydney, but this solid second set cements the Bells firmly in rock's melancholia tradition, echoing the Bunnymen and Tindersticks.
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The album's first half conceals those weaknesses beneath dramatic arrangements, but the law of diminishing returns sets in by the midway point.
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There exists a plodding, phoned-in emotional evenness here which, for a band trading on matters of the soul, is a big problem and one that will stop them entering the arenas those strings were employed for.
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Q Magazine[The new sound] works well on single 'Cities Burning Down,' which glides by catchily with a curious mix of muscle and lethargy, but it's less welcome on the cod-psychedlic 'Let's Be Kids' or the trite 'Golden Web,' both which are cosmetically seemless, but lack depth. [Apr 2009, p.105]
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All in all though, Radio Wars is disappointingly average; pleasant but fairly forgettable, and in contrast to its misleading title, should really have been named Radio Friendly instead.
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On their second album, Radio Wars, the Bells deliver billowy dream pop accented with atmospheric guitars, string arrangements and digitized beats.
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Howling Bells fall into the same trap that kills most sorta-weird rock bands when they try to write a more popular sophomore album: Everything sounds bigger, but everything is easily more forgettable.
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The way that Howling Bells constructed Radio Wars relies on strong melodies, hooks, songs, songs that aren’t really there, ideas not quite developed.
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Musically, it's all mid-tempo indie-by-numbers, shimmery enough to accompany an scene of upbeat emotion in Dawson's Creek; yet sufficiently credible, as indie so often is, to provide the soundtrack to a montage of trailers in an advert for a new Film 4 season.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 7 out of 12
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Mixed: 5 out of 12
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Negative: 0 out of 12
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RobertsJul 30, 2009Not half as good as their debut album. Adequate but forgettable.
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AJTFJul 29, 2009There's already one Metric.
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FredR.Jul 28, 2009