Album Review: Fire In The Radio Gives You “New Air” To Breathe

Fire In The Radio is a perfect band name for these punk-rockers that aim to set ablaze any pop-tunes or electro-bounces currently mainstream. With their new album, New Air, Fire In The Radio bring about a freshness to the music scene by revealing its staleness or, at least, the felt staleness that comes with having more fire in your mind than in the brains around you. Sometimes, the hardest part about thinking is the feeling/ knowing of being the only one with thoughts.

I have reviewed plenty of punk-rockers and musicians that infuse this genre because I am sincerely fascinated with it. Yet, Fire In The Radio’s New Air might be the first album to teach me something new about punk-rock. While I have always noted it as a music for inner turmoils and the soundtracks to social discord, New Air plays for the anxiety of thinking. It is not a social or spiritual album, as much as a mental one. “I Don’t Know, I Remember”, “Drug Life”, and “Adeline” lyrically describe the pain and anguish of never feeling like you can shut down your mind. The brain is seemingly hard-wired to over-think, as one thought fires twenty others, and Rich Carbone’s frenetic vocals evoke the anguish to not feel anguished. Many listeners will flock to the haunting ooh’s and desperate ahh’s throughout the album. Tracks like “Holy S**t” and “Vacant States” exemplify the band’s new exploration of punk rock as a platform for genre infusions like, new-wave, shoe-gaze, and grunge. Still, their combining with other musics is only to further evoke the tension of their lyrics. As Carbone rakes and rasps his vocals like, daggers are piercing him while he sings, the surrounding instrumentals build an aura of darkness and claustrophobia. Now, of course, this may not sound appealing to some, but, for punk-rockers, it is part of the reason this genre is so beloved. It has compartmentalized chaos into a guitar string, and boxed in stress into a vocal chord.

While the title, New Air, was meant to signify Fire In The Radio’s newer sound, as the album progresses, it becomes a symbol for the desired freshness we all want from our thoughts. We all want “new air” to breathe and feel less burdened by our inner feeling of “less”. Thus, Fire In The Radio have done excellent job in not just revamping their sound, but clearing their lyrics to further delve into the tension of being so thoughtful to the point of wanting to be thoughtless. For More Information On Fire In The Radio And To Buy New Air Click Here.