All Night Radio – Spirit Stereo Frequency
Band names rarely furnish a musical precis, but All Night Radio sums up the sounds of Spirit Stereo Frequency. Its ten tracks enter like welcome surprises across the FM spectrum, then fade as you drive by moonlight, with nothing but mountains and atmospheric turmoil to block transmissions.
The effect isn’t random. As founders of Beachwood Sparks, All Night Radio’s Dave Scher and Jimi Hey have already presented their knowledge of naturalistic psychedelia. This album is its own trip, no outside chemicals necessary. It travels from 50,000 watts in California to the contours of the mind. Tuning in and developing the modern-mystic musings of famed predecessors — the Beatles engaging in exploration, the Byrds gliding down from “Eight Miles High”, and of course Pink Floyd — All Night Radio drifts purposefully, knowing how if not where it wants to go.
How: along the frequencies, which Scher and Hey troll for decoration to hang over their nebulous songs. “Fall Down 7” waltzes to horns George Martin could have arranged, then subsides into a coda as incongruously right-on as the end of a Monty Python sketch. “Oh, When?” fires its filtered bass riff and with air-raid sirens, inserts a found-noise middle eight, then closes with a resounding echo on the muffled beat.
The last song, the group anthem “All Night Radio”, restates the point of Spirit Stereo Frequency, ringing the station changes for four minutes, then spending another four minutes in the static. It’s a suitable finale for an album that’s all about the accidental beauty you catch only between dark and dawn.