Usually when a 58-year-old man releases his first album, it becomes a bit of a punchline. Not so with ‘Radio Songs’, which is a decent collection of comfortable indie tracks, with elaborate rhythms and textures woven in. And taking a closer look at Dave Rowntree, one shouldn’t be too surprised.
He is a busy man. Outside of his day job as Blur’s drummer, the Colchester-born polymath has struck out as an animator, soundtrack composer, radio presenter, qualified lawyer, pilot and, until 2021, a councillor in Norfolk County Council. This record is clearly the product of a vivid and hungry imagination, with dozens of interesting influences being held together by a deep and detailed understanding of pop composition.
The most poppy track among these is London Bridge, a smashy synth journey flickering through the composer’s memories of the English landmark.
It melds Rowntree’s low-slung singing—stylistically similar to the sloppy drawl favoured by his bandmates Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon—with chunky electric drums and stodgy bass. It’s not going to set the world on fire, but it’s a lot better one might have lazily predicted.
Elsewhere, the most soaring track is the closer, Who’s Asking. It's a synth-pop fantasia landing somewhere between Nils Frahm and M83. It carries tremendous romantic heft and could easily have (read: probably did) started life as a piece of soundtrack music.It still has enough melodic interest to hold its own and here it acts as a moving finale to an album that lives on the edge of easy listening.
With Blur back on the road in 2023, it’s excellent timing for Rowntree’s compositional ambitions to emerge. And though ‘Radio Songs’ does feel like a lockdown album (complete with lots of studio synth work), it has the capacity to blossom into a pretty interesting live show. Whether he can find the time for it is another matter.
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