beat radio :: "Teenage Anthem For The Drunken Boat"

The first time beat radio's Brian Sendrowitz sings, "I made you a mixtape/okay, it's not a tape at all", you believe him. It's a dead technology. Probably no one you know has made a real compliation tape in going on two decades, a memory that you, like me, might keep alive by calling CDs, even playlists or zip files sent to girls far away, "mixtapes", even if it means lying to the last three generations of music technology. But the second time Sendrowitz sings the same lyric, high fret board guitars wail behind him, adding a level of romance that shatters even our most artful compartmentalization of memory. Maybe it was a tape after all. This inexorable march, this race of new formats - vinyl killed by cassettes killed by CDs killed by mp3s killed by the Cloud happened in less than 30 years - is unstoppable. Sendrowitz just isn't having it, confessing a desire to explode this bullet back into the gun, to repack Pandora's box, maybe taking with it her Internet radio. The final lyric is the killer, "I was looking for something that can't be encoded in zeros and ones." Magnetic tape is no better than binary coded mp3s, but for Sendrowitz our feelings about music could stand to move forward by going back. We were no better or more earnest back then, but we remember it differently. For beat radio, we can be those remembered better people, even when you're downloading this song across the Internet wasteland.

Listen :: beat radio - "Teenage Anthem For The Drunken Boat"

beat radio :: "beautiful one"

Latest beat radio single, "beautiful one", strays as close as possible to being a straight forward love song. Written by the band's lead singer Brian Sendrowitz for his wife - and this grants the chorus something stronger and more enduring than your average, hey-pretty-lady pop - it represents an immediate and linear understanding of love, like one of those things you write on the back of a receipt because you absolutely don't want to forget it. The second verse veers into Sun Also Rises territory, with a quick meditation about a Spanish matador, the power of glances, the implied deftness of raising the stakes and dodging the blow. All of this is draped in the wax-paper vocals and chimes of beat radio's perfect indie pop, making it an imperfect love song wrapped in a superlative, "I always thought you were the most beautiful one," a straight line between the beginning and ever.

Listen :: beat radio - "beautiful one"

beat radio :: "the best and the brightest"

Brian Sendrowitz of beat radio has a penchant for lower case letters and lo-fi pop music. With a couple albums in the can and a collection of 2010 singles building, beat radio's latest effort, "the best and the brightest" is predictably reflective. Sendrowitz exists in the new, modern luminosity, somewhere between being someone everyone knows and being an unknown that a few people are desperately loyal to. Of course, like everyone else, he searches for connective tissue in his work, in his art. A whirling arrangement, "the best and the brightest" tumbles in on itself like an imploding, forgotten sports arena in a Rust Belt city bent on rejuvenating downtown. With lyrics of past times like, "we were looking for something/someone we used to know," you picture an empty city, a lost protagonist and a search worth searching for.

Listen :: beat radio - "the best and the brightest"

On The List :: Beat Radio @ The Glasslands [2.5.10]

Glasslands is some separate slice of New York indie rock meta-cognition. It is self-consciously quirky, evoking more than just the distinction of being an "art space," becoming an "Art Space," like some officially incorporated version of The House of Yes. The walls are lined with found-objects constructed with coherent, if intentionally jarring methodology, in an attempt to approximate a more holistic art brut. The most beautiful of these is a puffy white suggestion of cumulus cloud-cover above the stage, back-lit to indicate some sort of explosiveness, in lower-light forecasting a fire in the sky. And in front of this Brian Sendrowitz and Beat Radio are motoring through their set.

In the classic spirit of basement bands and Art Space Shows, Beat Radio are going on late and have major keyboard problems. For a band that relies on delicate, shadowy arrangements, losing your keys isn't an ideal scenario. Sendrowitz and his band seem a little out-of sync, struggling with an over-matched sound guy and a lead-guitarist insistent on overplaying his role. However, against the odds, Beat Radio are still infectious and affecting (the guitarist from Bridges and Powerlines will later call them "his favorite New York band").

The band played "Follow You Around" early, a difficult trick in the live environment, especially without the signature keyboards of the studio original. Relying on material from their most recent LP, Safe Inside The Sound, the set was, unfortunately, cut short because of the late start. Sendrowitz would give us a reference from stage because, undeniably, we share a sense of "the moment" (or tonight, is it The Moment). This was before playing "Sunday Matinee," the band's closing song and proof positive that Beat Radio can negotiate the hymns of youth with the maturity of adulthood, even without keys in a nameless Art Space on the water.

Listen :: Beat Radio - "Sunday Matinee"

Preview :: Red Wire Black Wire and Beat Radio @ Glasslands [Tonight]

Tonight, two of New York's finest young bands are playing Glasslands in Williamsburg. Red Wire Black Wire are hot on the heels of their September release, Robots and Roses (and a July write-up from us) as Beat Radio prepares a series of monthly singles, the first of which can be found here.

Sonically, Red Wire Black Wire is exactly as explosive as the reference to bomb-defusion in their name would indicate. Emanating from the same Wesleyan-milieu that churned out MGMT, Boy Crisis and Amazing Baby, RWBW make dark, synth-driven music that manages to critically wink at genre while still taking a considerable dose of seriousness with their spoonful of sugar. Beat Radio, a drastically different animal, provide the kind of reflective tomes that come from quivering voices, shimmering lyrics and a working knowledge of Ben Gibbard's earliest work. The soundscapes are rich and moving and lead singer Brian Sendrowitz's voice sometimes whispering, other times yelling into the void.

Listen :: Red Wire Black Wire - "Breathing Fire"
Listen :: Beat Radio - "Sleepwalking"

beat radio :: "Sunday Matinee" and "Sleepwalking"

I have a particularly bad habit of pointing out my favorite part of a song. Now, this is not irrational but it is probably pretty annoying as I look increasingly excited, raise my hand in a "stop, no, no, keep going" sort of way and say something like, "wait, this is my favorite part." It is reductionist. It is socially gauche. It is still what keeps me coming back to certain moments in music - my favorite part, maybe at your expense, but my favorite part.

New York's beat radio have a fuzzy pop-record with lyrics from the confessional and observational school of Ben Gibbard. "Sunday Matinee" is a back-loaded meditation on what it feels like to go see rock music with a girl that you're uncontrollably into. Perhaps more importantly, it's about finding that moment, in yourself or in someone else, where you say "stop stop, this is my favorite part." Finding transcendence in one moment, "when the bass drops out/and the singer screams and shouts/and you say, 'this is that song I was talkin' about,'" and meaning in a quieter one: "and when you lean in close/and tell me it's the part you love the most." Yeah, waitwait, this is it. Right here. Listen.

Listen :: beat radio - "Sunday Matinee"
Listen :: beat radio - "Sleepwalking"