A Band You Should Know: Radiation Flowers

May 31, 2017 | by Jeffrey Thiessen

Radiation Flowers are a band from my neck of the woods, and honestly I’ve been a music journalist for almost 10 years now, and I NEVER write about bands from my neck of the woods (Saskatoon, SK Canada). RF has left me with no choice. On the surface they’re a shoegaze band, but upon a few listens their self-titled debut is elliptical and wildly varied within a pretty loose framework. The genre’s conventions are splattered all over the map. Every song has a driving sense of melody, but is never afraid to let their music breathe, and definitely never afraid to get physical (witness the brilliant "Wall of Gold" solo or the crescendo of album closer "Lead Me Tonight"). No lame odes to inertia here. This is gorgeous, spacious music arriving like uninterpreted dreams, intimate and immediate. The basic design of shoegaze can be wimpy at times — the goal a little aimless, the delivery ineffectual. Radiation Flowers stand out within this genre, and that might be a big reason I love them so much. They are much, much too good of a band to exist where I live, so I would suggest you let them exist where you do. Radiation Flowers will give you a ride for sure, but all the beauty you’ll see on the trip is serrated, magnetic. A phantasm lurks on their debut album, which somehow always manages to link soulful, fuzzed-out noise to a deeper symbiosis.