by Ziggy Merritt
Ah, nostalgia. It’s this one immutable concept that has driven many of us to fantasize about the good ol’ days of Nick at Night, Animaniacs, and Baby Bottle Pops. Nostalgia crystallizes these memories into something much loftier than they are in plain reality, but it also gives us a sense of what we love and what we like. Often those things we like are informed by the things we love. For me this can be represented best in the 2010 album, Clinging to a Scheme by the enigmatic Swedish outfit, The Radio Dept.
This album represents the start of my obsession with all things indie, something that still very much burns alive today by virtue of the fact that I write about it quite frequently for this magazine. The album in its entirety belonged on a single gig mp3 player that I had brought along with me to Greece and Italy back in the summer of 2010 when I was fresh out of high school. Along with Erasure’s greatest hits collection and the Cocteau Twins album, Four-Calendar Cafe, it was one of the few things that occupied me on the long, burdensome bus rides from location to location.
Coming back to it now, I’m still amazed how much it holds up five years after its release, which realistically was not all that long ago. From the start of the first track, “Domestic Scene”, you can hear frontman Johan Duncanson’s dour recollections of childhood and soured relationships. Layered over these lyrics is the smoky haze of electronic noise that harkens back to vintage My Bloody Valentine and begs further contemporary comparisons to the dreamy, noise-pop of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart.
Unlike those contemporaries, The Radio Dept. is relaxed in their tempo despite the relatively short length of this release as the more introspective tracks such “A Token of Gratitude” and “Memory Loss” would attest to. “The Video Dept” is perhaps the sole exception here with Duncanson’s voice faded out above the din of electronic noise and guitars. Adding to the vintage atmosphere created here is the relative ambiguity of the lyrics on this track in particular: “I have kept your diary on tape/ I have covered every angle of your face/ From ear to ear and then you would smile/ And disappear for a while.”
Interestingly this album also infrequently samples soundbites, most prominently on “Heaven’s on Fire” which starts with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore exclaiming that “we should destroy the bogus capitalist process that is destroying youth culture.” From front to back, Clinging to the Scheme pays such close reverence to that very youth culture that Moore espouses. Perhaps this is why the album connected with me in such a profound way as I traveled the ruins of ancient Hellenistic civilization. It’s not just an album about heartbreak or loss or even childhood. At its core this album is representative of growing up and moving away from the childish preoccupations of the past.
