Radio Over Moscow - Battletech

 Radio Over Moscow- Battletech
 7/10

This album doesn’t sound like any of the bands mentioned in the press release, well Gary Numan perhaps but definitely not Nirvana, The Beatles, Primal Scream or The Smashing Pumpkins.  Radio Over Moscow is the solo assignment of Aucklander Dan Satherley (KittyHawk, Vetox, Luna Spark) and Battletech is his first solo release. Bringing ’90s pop-punk into the twenty-first century, Battletech covers common ground with just a subtle pinch of unfamiliarity; synthesisers and drum machines. Imagine if Blink 182 went electro or Placebo ditched the dark make-up, Radio Over Moscow brings the two together in a mechanical blender, adding slices of metallic sounding synths and sci-fi rhythms. Sprouting multiple seeds of futuristic punk, alien grunge, contorted new-wave and geographically nondescript Brit-pop, Battletech provides a moderately eclectic genre fix and is well structured, allowing the songs to merge together without sounding disjointed. Opener ‘The Purpose Of Man’ is an electro sherbet hit echoing The Faint and flows directly into ‘Anti-human Nous’ which utilises similar synth techniques but puts a vocoder effect on the vocals.

‘Policies’ and ‘Fiction’ both have a real pop-punk quality about them and would cross over nicely onto mainstream radio. Both come sprinkled with impressionist touches of pre-Emo punk but are much more classier and technological than most of their predecessors. ‘True’ sounds a bit like a lost Harvey Danger track, while ‘Where Are You?’ has its roots in a 1970s sci-fi flick. The final two tracks (’Twist It’ and ‘The Sum Of Your Knowledge Is Nil’) don’t really fit on Battletech, their elusive acoustic guitar riffs and jangly pop vibes sound totally out of place. On their own they’re both great songs, but here they just give the album a padded anticlimactic ending. For a solo debut, Battletech is well guided and ambitious, and as a bonus it’s available in two versions; one is loud and compressed and can be downloaded for free from Radio Over Moscow’s website, while the other version has been mastered to have an old-school vinyl quality.
Nick

Visit radioovermoscow.com to purchase both versions of Battletech