Tuner salad

Citing influences as diverse as Primal Scream, The Clash, ’70s disco, Gang Of Four, electronica, New York dance and Talking Heads, NY’s Radio 4 – a five-piece dance/punk riot – are on a mission to give music a new lease of life.

Their cut and paste policy mixes live instruments with weird studio noises and digital effects, stringing together the most essential threads from each genre and intertwining them into one cohesive, ulitmately explosive track.

“We’ve always been excited by punk rock and abrasive guitar music growing up, but we’re also pretty heavily in to dance music and electronic stuff”, says frontman Anthony Roman. “Even dance music that’s like soul or disco – pre-electronic stuff. We just decided that we should try and bring it all together in a way that we thought would have a real animated, physical element to it.”

This “physical” element is the muscle in the guitar tracks, the fuzzy, rough edges in the kick drum, the groove in the bass, and adds hugely to the record’s incendiary live feel – a commodity all-too-often traded in return for the digital route.

“We tracked it (the 2002 LP, Gotham!) live by ourselves, then we hooked up with these producers – The DFA – and we just started messing with things, adding loops and electronic drums and weird sounds. We already had the live sound down, so then we just messed with it so it still kept that live feel. And the producers were really set on keeping the live thing, so it was a healthy mix.”

The DFA (or Death From Above) have worked their production magic on artists including UNKLE, Primal Scream and our very own David Holmes. In fact, Radio 4 sound a bit like The Free Association would, if you replaced the funk and soul with rock and punk, (“I’d agree with that”, confirms Anthony).

“The DFA had a pretty significant effect on the overall sound of the record”, adds Anthony, “because they were able to bring out in us things that we didn’t even know we had, take us in directions we wanted to go and make the vision actually possible. They made it happen, whereas we had these ideas, but technically, we wouldn’t have that Pro Tools/programming savvy to realise them. We know how to play our instruments live and we hear things in our head, but it’s hard for us to achieve them – that’s where The DFA came in.”

The band were “discovered” by City Slang (the indie label alt-country meisters Calexico and electroclash rockers The Faint call home) at the Texas music convention, South By South West. Having offered to release their album in Europe (“He seemed like a cool guy”, remembers Anthony), City Slang helped push the band up the ladder from garage/EP status to releasing records worldwide in the space of a mere 12 months – while still retaining that all-important indie aesthetic.

“It’s been an interesting year”, he quips. “We played London last February in front of, like, 25 people and then we went back this February and sold out a 1,000 capacity venue. That’s in a year. And when you can do it on your own terms, it is kind of pleasing.”