Blur’s Dave Rowntree spins the dial with debut album ‘Radio Songs’
‘Devils Island’, the opening track featured on Dave Rowntree’s debut solo album, is a patchwork of glitched electronic beats, Bonobo-esque harp loops and warm piano chords. Listening is a bit like walking the circumference of that giant radio installation they keep in the Tate Modern, which, fitted with a hundred different radios all broadcasting something different, creates a sort of wall of sonic colour. Most of you will know Dave Rowntree as the drummer of Blur. In this debut solo record, he sows together a series of introspective, electro-tinged ballads with fizzing threads of radio static.
As a child, Dave Rowntree would often build radio kits at the kitchen table with the help of his father. On completing them, they would use the antenna in the garden to tune into radio stations from across the globe, introducing Rowntree to the exotic sounds that colour this new album, an album which seems to be more about the stuff in between the songs – those fragments of sampled radio static – than the songs themselves.
“The idea of Radio Songs is me spinning through the dial,” Rowntree explains in a press release. “It sounds like you’ve got a radio tuned to some static and you spin the dial, and the song pops out of it. And then you spin the dial again, and the song dissolves back into the static.” Such a thematic approach could only have been dreamt up by a musician with a sideline in TV and film composition.
Obviously, that sounds brilliant written down. In reality, the approach is fairly inconsequential. Sure, the sound of somebody spinning the dial may have served as the foundation for this record, but it isn’t incorporated into the fabric of Rowntree’s songs in any meaningful sense – not in the way Toro y Moi did with his record Mahal. At best, Rowntree’s samples serve to ground an album swirling with rootless musical fragments.
Radio Songs marks the first time Dave Rowntree has stepped in front of the microphone as a singer in his own right, having previously provided backing vocals during Blur’s live performances. He doesn’t seem to have been particularly phased by the prospect. “I’m kind of unselfconscious in the studio, having spent half my working life there,” he claims. “What really helped was I took trumpet lessons during lockdown. Absolute disaster. My trumpet-playing sounds like wild geese being murdered by a fox. But that really nailed the breathing aspect of singing for me. I’m still experimenting with my voice.”
Rowntree’s voice is certainly serviceable, but his lyrics leave something to be desired. Thankfully, Leo Abrahams’s (Brian Eno, Imogen Heap) immersive production style is mesmeric enough to counter their ill effects, with tracks like ‘Volcano’ and ‘Machines Like Me’ providing more abstract, cinematic moments. In tracks like ‘Devil’s Island’, however, Rowntree’s emphasis on UK politics – he’s a former labour councillor – crushes the delightful ambiguity of this occasionally chirpy and frequently doom-laden offering. Radio Songs is a sonic feast that’ll be popular with people who grew up listening to Blur’s singles on the radio. What it’s unlikely to do is bring in many new fans.
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