The Club Is Open by Radderall & Muzzy Fossa – new album review
The Club Is Open by Radderall & Muzzy Fossa – new album review
Cleveland, Ohio-based Radderall and Muzzy Fossa have freshly joined forces with a little help from their friends on The Club Is Open, recently released on Wax Mage Records. Conceived over the past three years, the imaginative and ambiguous concept album is “as much a psychedelic head trip as it is a reflection on self-image, friendship, and the fantasies we chase to avoid our own stillness.”
For this collaborative effort, Nathan Hunt a.k.a. Muzzy Fossa, and Radderall – comprised of Zach Taneyhill, Jonathan McAllister & Alex Eliopoulos – recruited an impressive cast of musicians from Cleveland’s indie scene including Ryan Fletterick a.k.a. Songs for an Unknown God, Morgan Fox, Jessica Jones, Smith Taylor, Morning Silk, Joey “J.D.” Kardos, Bobby Dagget and Clyde Maruna. To engineer and mix this diverse lineup which varies from song to song, they enlisted Jim Stewart, Jonathan Chips, Tuck Mindrum, Andrew Veres, and the Akron Recording Company.
A quirky, flanged bass line and disco-like rhythm kick off the lively “Duplicity Life,” one of the album’s better and few up-tempo tracks. With pulsating synthesizers it evokes a chill dance club vibe, with melodic yet thickly processed singing. As a native Clevelander, the song recalls the atmosphere of past club-hopping downtown around West 9th Street and the east bank of the Flats.
“Baseball” briefly begins with reverse-tape playback before quickly settling into a West Coast Rap slow jam arrangement, genre-mashing hip-hop balladry with ethereal interludes. Psychedelic-laden studio effects permeate “Solitude,” producing an auditory illusion of speeding up and slowing down, while the song itself evokes European dance pop with Spanish semitones before dissolving into the aether.
The group delves into the sounds of shoegaze on “Mr. Anywhere.” With its sedated arrangement, breathy vocale, atmospheric synths and soaring lead of sustained electric guitar, to this reviewer the track is reminiscent of Luna Waves’ recent releases.
Radderall & Muzzy Fossa by Lauren Anderson
Presented as an amorous, dynamic duet with an effective tempo change, “Movies” features both Hunt’s and Taneyhill’s voices with one distinctly heard and the other heavily processed by digital effects. Eventually we hear the latter’s vocals and slight English accent clearly for the first time on the catchy “Game Over.” After starting with a synth line that could have been written by 90s-era Dr. Dre, it develops into a Talking Heads-style arrangement complete with saxophone, teasing reggae on the refrain.
“Every Minute” returns to shoegaze form, with a lackadaisical feel that betrays its lyrical carpe diem message of making every minute and every second count. It features a worthy directive, creative musical arrangement and psychedelic production. Yet the song is curiously presented as a staid dreamscape while professing to seizing the day; a credo that would be better delivered as an up-tempo anthem with some semblance of fervor and enthusiasm.
Radderall & Muzzy Fossa by Lauren Anderson
One of the album’s most coherent songs, “Fools” is a slick lounge-lizard number that you can’t help but snap your fingers along to. Refreshingly, the jazzy instrumentation and alluring vocals are clearly heard without being overly processed. Written by Hunt and Taneyhill as is customary on this release, “Fools” has the uncanny timeless feel of a century-old jazz standard.
“Lana Lane” – which they dropped as a single earlier this autumn – begins with a pleasantly dissonant electric guitar riff, joined by the established breathy, reverb-laden vocale. Recalling the innocence of youth and the street that he grew up on, Hunt croons “(y)ou’re only a step away from Lana Lane. You’re only a breath away from yesterday.” The track has an interesting double meaning; while reminding us that we are not so far removed from our youth that we are all young at heart for as long as we choose to be, it could also be seen as a lamentation of having not traveled very far.
A hypnotic, restrained beat begins “Planted,” pleasantly featuring choral harmonies before delving into Floydian territory with a thematic David Gilmour-like guitar hook. As the album nears its denouement, the motif has a slight return to the “Every Minute Reprise” which is lyricless and too brief to be impactful. “Edmund” concludes the release by introducing and beseeching a quizzical wayfarer, supplanted by Beatleseque arrangement and production.
Radderall & Muzzy Fossa by Lauren Anderson
The Club Is Open is an ambitious concept album that touches so much ground, it is elusive and not easy to chase – much like a musical squirrel. From psych-pop to shoegaze to jazz to disco to West Coast hip-hop, Radderall & Muzzy Fossa traverse multiple environments in Gotham while searching for a “mythical venue embodying indulgence, escape, and ego.” While it may or may not satiate aficionados of the musical genres it includes, The Club Is Open has a little bit of something for everyone.
The Club Is Open by Radderall & Muzzy Fossa is available on vinyl and digital download on Bandcamp, and also on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and other digital platforms
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