I liked “Twisted Time Travellers,” my first encounter with The Goodbye Radio; I love their new one, “That’s the Point!” That’s the great thing about writing about music for a living: while much of it is merely work to be done, occasionally you stumble across a band that you feel would have become a favorite even if you had found them through the usual channels.
“That’s the Point” takes all that was great about ’80s jangle popsters and ’90s indie stalwarts, blends them deftly and delicately, turns the infectiousness button up to eleven, and carpet bombs the modern music scene with its brilliance.
I’m not one for hyperbole; I like to take a more grounded of the music that falls under my pen, but that said, this is fantastic, one of the best songs to hit my ears in a long time. It is, at times, spacious and driving, lush and succinct with guitars wandering between raw walls of sound and contagious riffs, as well as dropping in some fleeting yet scintillating motifs. The beats are propulsive, and the bass line relentlessly groovesome without doing much at all…I mean that in the most positive ways.
It’s a song about a corporate burnout finding their salvation not in work, money, and success but in love —a theme that, in the hands of lesser bands, might come off as naive or soppy, but here is finely tuned and brilliantly finessed.
The fact that you can hear echoes of icons such as R.E.M. and Teenage Fanclub pulsing away in the background speaks volumes.
