It’s difficult to write about The Radical Face because I feel an intense desire to compare them to about 100 different bands, but none of them seem quite right. It’s like when you meet a new person and they remind you in some indescribable way of every person you were friends with in high school.
At the risk of throwing you off track, here’s a quick list: Low, Sufjan Stevens, Bright Eyes, Ben Gibbard, and (despite my insistence last month that we really ought to stop saying that people sound like them) Arcade Fire. None of them is really an appropriate comparison. It’s more chamber-pop than Sufjan, less precious than Bright Eyes, more folky than Arcade Fire, and with an air that just doesn’t quite seem duplicable by anyone.
Instead of trying to draw difficult comparisons, let me recommend you simply listen for yourself:
The long, slow, Celtic-tinged and achingly beautiful introduction should be enough to make it clear that we are dealing with something special. Then the wordless chorus at about 2:30 makes your heart melt and you wonder where this song has been all your life. And I won’t even try to talk about what happens in the last minute. All in all, it’s epic in the most genuine sense of the word – it grows, expands, and transcends its own space and time. It is a song full of ambition that could easily have fallen flat but instead rises effortlessly to the heavens.
The record is called Ghost, and was released last month. “Glory” is the best song, but many of the others are nearly as good.