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.