I’m not really sure if Radium 88’s album “Escaping Tomorrow” should be classed as background music or, indeed, whether that was even the band’s intention but it is nonetheless true that these nine songs could easily drift by less discerning ears.
In amongst all the sonorous plasticity of “Escaping Tomorrow” are anomalies however and it is these discontinuities that mark this album out as interesting. There is a bizarre BBC announcer doing the Hitchhiker’s Guide To Galaxy thing on “The Unerring Certainty of Mechanism” that provides a bizarre upper middle class counterpoint to the angelic female vocals that drift, in the best classical style, through the song as a recurring theme. You can then play that against the Jean Michel Jarre styled “Lady of Perpetual Motion” that seems more pastiche than the true Euro electro blandness that it purports to be. All is not as simple as it seems.
Whilst “Escaping Tomorrow” does meander somewhat, there is clearly a plan behind the strategic musical operations of Radium 88 and you might need an extended period on the headphones to figure out what it is.
Available from CD Baby.