In 2001, Boston College professor Michael Keith wrote a book called Sounds in the Dark: All-Night Radio in American Life. In it, Keith explores the socio-cultural motivation behind middle-of-the-night radio broadcasts, prodding at the occasionally curious demographics of all-night radio listeners-- think people in sweaters driving cars and drinking black coffee from plastic thermoses, security guards flipping through decks of cards, janitors pushing buckets, or insomniacs eating crackers and gnawing their fingernails. As a companion, all-night radio is warm and crackly, vaguely surreal, and encoded in the way that late-night activities always are. Everyone thinks just a little bit differently at night: familiar objects become encrypted by darkness, taking shapes that aren't their own; dimensions are expanded, images are distorted, and everything inadvertently and suddenly becomes really, really weird.
Thus, the meandering, blowsy psych-rock of All Night Radio. Fronted by ex-Beachwood Sparks members Dave Scher and Jimi Hey, All Night Radio have successfully captured the shape-shifting, peculiar magic of midnight crackles and shitty speakers, freaky callers and awkward on-air personalities. The band's full-length debut, Spirit Stereo Frequency, is, happily, just as fuzzy and unpredictable as its namesake suggests, with high, hissing vocals, archaic-gone-futuristic blips, pedal steel, keyboards, glockenspiel, and a barrage of other noisemakers helping to build a thick, spacy stretch of soft 60s psychedelia.
Opener "Daylight Till Dawn" mixes Scher and Hey's gentle, lapping vocals with whiny guitar, their rousing chorus of "I wanna wake up in the morning!" tempered by a bum-bum-bum vocal breakdown and plenty of echo. Most of Spirit Stereo Frequency comes in short waves: "We're on Our Wave" is framed by samples of crashing tides and filled with sweet, Byrds-ish whispers, each vocal dose perfectly rising, cresting and falling, while "Sky Bicycle (You've Been Ringing)" is a galactic, meandering high, with tinkling melodies blowing up and then subsiding in a tiny cloud of pink and yellow smoke.
Much like a sleepless night, Spirit Stereo Frequency lags a bit in the middle, mimicking the inevitable dip and sag of insomnia: the initial rush of adrenaline wanes, resources are gradually exhausted, and, somehow, there are still plenty of empty hours to fill before daybreak. When the moon finally sinks, the sun-spotted reward turns out to be well-worth your patience: closing self-anthem "All Night Radio" is a buoyant singalong, the perfect soundtrack to careening down the interstate at 4:00am or launching streaming blue rockets into space.
Awesomely, Scher and Hey claim to have composed these songs based on non-stop bandwidth signals from the sun, and caution that signal content can vary based on "atmospheric conditions." It's entirely possible that they're right-- depending on exactly what brand of moonlight you end up dancing under, Spirit Stereo Frequency can be an empathetic buddy, an omnipresent guide, or just the perfect accompaniment to the most illogical of all human situations.
