Sam Cook-Parrott has quietly built up a bit of reputation in recent years among people who like their scrappy underdog pop-punk with a tender heart on its sleeve. Torch Song, the breakthrough album that his Philly band, Radiator Hospital, released in 2014, featured a highly endearing breakup song, “Cut Your Bangs,” amid guest appearances by Katie and Allison Crutchfield. Since then, Radiator Hospital have cut a split EP with likeminded British DIY-pop group Martha, while Cook-Parrott has lent his bed-headed backing vocals to sweetly shambolic tunes by Fred Thomas, Allison Crutchfield, and, perhaps most visibly, Japanese Breakfast. He also released a self-titled album as one-half of duo the Afterglows. The stage would seem to be set for Cook-Parrott to translate this cachet among indie-pop peers to a wider audience.
Play the Songs You Like, the first full-length Radiator Hospital LP since Torch Song, once again teams Cook-Parrott with fellow guitarist-vocalist Cynthia Schemmer, drummer Jeff Bolt, and bass player Jon Rybicki. Like its predecessor, it’s packed with short, energetic songs that tend toward bashful yearning. Cook-Parrott’s slurry squeak of a voice, which many first heard on Waxahatchee’s 2013 album Cerulean Salt, remains a distinctive instrument, and there’s a spirited sincerity to these songs that should keep the already-converted bouncing around mistily in ramshackle venues. But the group’s highest-profile release to date feels strangely like a missed opportunity.
Although Play the Songs You Like is 16 tracks long, they tend to blur together. That’s true of the fast songs, such as the snare-snapping “Out of Mind,” where Cook-Parrott slurs about waking up “with your picture in my mind,” or the bristling “Lonely Road,” which finds him out there “talking to myself.” But it’s also true of the more midtempo, Byrds-descended tunes, like the dreamily resigned “Nothing Nice,” with its closed-down comic book shop, or “Cheap Day,” a ringing reminiscence on an image in an old magazine. The sharp songwriting voice behind Torch Song—the one that put the kick into “You say you’ll cut your bangs/I’m calling your bluff,” on that album’s kiss-off standout—feels less present here. Maybe those bangs got cut after all. There are a few welcome changeups—the patient space-out “Also Ran,” the winsome Schemmer showcase “Half Empty,” the mumbly acoustic ballad “Heart of Darkness”—but they come across as just that, changeups from a formula that’s not quite working.
Some of Radiator Hospital’s best work in the past has made reference to the ways that music intertwines with memory, going back to “Our Song” and “Down Again” from 2013’s partly self-recorded Something Wild. But here the meta-songwriting seems a tad counterproductive. In one consecutive three-song stretch, we get “Pastoral Radio Hit,” which has a buoyant Shins-like chorus melody; “Old Refrain,” which is enjoyably rambunctious; and “The Songs You Like,” which waxes nostalgic for those nights when a particular piece of music sounded best. None are much more memorable than their placeholder-like titles. (When the Chills called a song “Heavenly Pop Hit,” at least it was actually heavenly pop, dangit.) A few tracks later, “The People at the Show” rips into someone who’s “talking… damn near screaming.” Like much of the rest of this album, that line comes across as well-intentioned and decent, but ultimately uninspiring. It certainly wouldn’t be enough to quiet the loudmouth in the back of the bar.
Sadly, that remains the case even when Radiator Hospital play a song that some indie-pop diehards may already like. The penultimate track, “Sycamore,” is a fine cover of a song by Martha, whose Blisters in the Pit of My Heart was one of last year’s underappreciated gems. It’s a nice gesture of friendship, but the 2013 original managed to convey its jittery internal conflicts more distinctively, without sounding so much like yet another 1990s indie-rock pastiche.
“In between the notes of your favorite song/You try and figure where it went wrong/But it went wrong long ago in many different ways,” Cook-Parrott sings at the start of “Dance Number,” Play the Songs You Like’s bouncy lead single. Sometimes it’s less a question of going wrong than not quite finding the spark that makes something go right. In the same song, he adds, “I find meaning in this life when I wake up every day/But I’m feeling sick and tired in new and frightening ways.” Finally, it’s a memorable line—but what meaning he’s found, and how those ways are similar to or different from the ways we’re all feeling sick and tired, is left for another song.
