The Radio Dept.
Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002-2010

I walk in this warm November, I had forgotten I could walk so much. With earphones, which I hadn't done in a long time. My streets are covered with dead leaves, falling gently with a gust of wind, nothing keeps them attached to the season of life anymore, yet that leaf knows it will be replaced by a more vigorous sister, aiming higher, only to fall lower.

They rot in infinite tones and seem like a carpet of precious stones, ambers, lapis lazuli, opals, agates, the asphalt itself appears to me as a sea of sapphire. The oak leaves are like enduring granites, the birch leaves thin and fragile like sandstone, the fig leaves curl and become as funerary as obsidian.

I look at the carpet, I feel good with this music in my headphones, going to see the purple and spectral colors of the karst alone in this season would hurt the heart, so I walk through my small streets, with the Radio Dept. The Swedes, believe it or not, have made more EPs than LPs and by itself this seems like a good reason to review their most beautiful leaves, those that fall far from the eyes and are not trampled by most.

Passive Aggressive is the collection of "all" the EPs and singles that the guys from Lund have amassed up to 2010, and in the meantime, two more EPs have been released. There's a lot of material, yet there's equally much missing. This is truly a compilation, that is Johan Duncanson did as he pleased, he inserted the published singles and the unofficial ones and then randomly sprinkled in some pearls extracted from the countless EPs, taking the luxury of omitting compositions like above all: the sweet and very dirty leaf of “I Don’t Need Love I’ve Got My Band”.

I'll tell you about the unreleased songs contained in this collection: it starts with a ballad with a cellar echo flavor of “Annie Laurie”, a rare acoustic performance by the trio. They are followed by the typical interweavings of guitars and keyboards that characterize the group as in “Pulling Our Weight”. Special mention for the subsequent “This Past Week”, almost a psychedelic waltz. It goes from accelerated dub “We Made the Team” to dream-pop pieces “Bachelor Kisses” to compositions I might define as techno (?) “Freddie and the Trojan Horse” and others I could only describe as indie-pop “The New Improved Hypocrisy”. This is where the first part ends.

Here begins the second with the roughest punk “Liebling”. And here I stop because the second part is the most genuine where every song is unreleased or extracted from EPs and it’s worth discovering them one by one (otherwise you might regret it: “You and Me Then?”).

The music of Radio Dept. is like this, it appears raw, as covered by a multicolored carpet of fallen leaves, but it's a "dirtiness" that leads to rebirth, to the cleanliness of melodies in the background, never predictable, clearly distinct. The music of Radio Dept. is a spring autumn.