Radical Dads are a trio—Lindsay Baker, Chris Diken and Robbie Guertin—who still manage to come together to make music despite the fact they live 5,399 miles apart. Their new album album, Paved Mountain, due for release next month, is the fourth in the Radical Dads canon and the first since 2015’s Universal Coolers.
As Anna Haifisch’s album artwork suggests, one of the themes of the record is art, particularly how themes and ideas resonate with life in general (both metaphorically and not). Nowhere is this more apparent that on lead single ‘Vanishing Point’. Inspired by a documentary film on photo-realistic artist Vija Celmins, it gives the phrase “still life” a whole new meaning. Radical Dads ruminate on the silent freeze-frame nature of a painting and ask whether we can apply a similar sense of quiet and stillness to our lives. “Her drawings and paintings and prints are extremely unremarkable images of space, clouds, water,” Baker explains. “I kept thinking about how she takes these images of turbulent water and makes them feel frozen and still. Maybe the song is about the continuum of turbulence to stillness.”
If that sounds uncharacteristically emotive, fear not, ‘Vanishing Point’ finds Radical Dads doing what they do best. Following in the footsteps of their college rock influences (e.g. Sleater-Kinney, Built to Spill, Yo La Tengo), they show that fun, noisy indie rock can have a deeper message too. Opening with muffled restraint, it soon kicks into life, charting its own spectrum of calm and motion that veers between carefree abandon and a kind of sun-bleached wistfulness.
It could be a still life if you want it to be
