Rarely do I miss having a car. But sometimes, I do miss driving around and blasting the tape deck stereo super loud while confined inside my own private bubble. There’s something about that limitation and its ability to hold you captive; without an easy way to skip ahead to the next song, you get to know each individual fold in an album, to the point where you can sing every lyric and every guitar riff in a way that can be difficult to do now with unlimited streaming. It’s a sentiment that Radical Dads seems to embrace on its upcoming EP, Cassette Brain.
Coming off a pair of well-received albums — 2013’s Rapid Reality and 2011’s Mega Rama — the Brooklyn trio is set to drop this four-song collection (two new, two archival) as a cassette-only release that perfectly matches the band’s thick and sludgy guitar pop sound. We already got a taste of the first single, “In The Water,” but now get another with the EP’s title track, “Cassette Brain.”
Comprised of longtime friends singer and guitarist Lindsay Baker, guitarist Chris Diken, and drummer Robbie Guertin (formerly of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah), Radical Dads owes its hilarious name to both internal rhyme and, well, their actual rad dads. And the band makes the kind sharp-edged songs that would fit on those old ‘90s mixtapes. “Cassette Brain” is a gloriously noisy yet remarkably melodic song — full of thunderous drums, scorching guitar lines, and Baker’s sweet yet powerful voice howling above the sheets of distortion.
But the song is particularly potent when Baker compares a tape spinning with the anxious feeling of over-thinking and replaying moments in your life in your mind — and trying to escape the painful parts by erasing over them. “Press play on the tape recorder / my cassette brain going over and over / press play on the tape recorder / my cassette brain tape-recording over,” she sings. Later, Baker repeatedly asserts, “We might get swept away,” as the static swells around around her.
I wouldn’t say I’m nostalgic for tapes — at least, not in the way some are in this whole “cassette revival” thing that’s been happening lately. But hearing “Cassette Brain” sure makes me wanna rev up that old Honda Civic like it’s 1997 again, drive around until well after dusk, and and play this song over and over.