Radio Red

Album review

Laura Groves released Radio Red, her second album, 14 years after her debut as Blue Roses, a guise under which she made primarily acoustic folk songs before honing interior art-pop credited to her birth name. Amid standalone tracks and collaborations with other artists -- she also toured as a keyboardist and background singer for Bat for Lashes -- Groves scattered three EPs capped in 2020 with A Private Road. Her first release for Bella Union, A Private Road was trailed by more featured appearances and further tantalizing slow-drip offerings like the compilation track "Heaven Again." Subtly linking Blue Roses to Radio Red is an association with signals. A faded daytime image of a lighthouse covers the former, while the title of this LP was inspired by the transmitter tower lights viewable from the home studio where Groves records. Those lights are referenced in the lyrics of the glimmering opener "Sky at Night" to elucidate Groves' frustrations about interference thwarting communication, the album's main theme. The record is heaviest in emotion when it's stripped down to little more than voice and electric piano. "I'm Not Crying" is a tense scene in the wake of a rupture where Groves asks "Can we just get on with it?" with a hint of impatience before urging "Come back and leave me alone" -- her conflicting feelings of longing and vexation somehow powerfully conveyed in a wisp of breath. "D 4 N" is similarly weightless until the halfway entrance of a gentle throb and glinting synthesizer, intensifiers that don't drown out Groves (and the harmonizing Sampha) as she sweetly requests, "Just make me feel good -- no need to learn your lines." Not all is informed by heartache; "Good Intention," her "A Little More Love" if not a full-blown belter, is beatific, deftly sugared. For the most part, these ballads are built around piano and keyboards treated to give off a dreamlike quality akin to pictures taken with a lens coated in petroleum jelly. One exception is "Synchronicity," making a direct and ringing connection to Groves' former alias with soft curlicues of guitar spun through affirmations of receiving a clear signal ("[You] make it easy when you show your emotion"). While nothing here increases the pulse like EP standouts such as "Dream Story" and "Infinite Wisdom," the sustained and unusual sense of solace is heartwarming enough.
© Andy Kellman /TiVo