Broadway Calls - Radiophobia

 

  Broadway Calls are a pop punk band from Rainier, Oregon who formed around 15 years ago and feature a line up of Josh Baird (drums), Ty Vaughn (guitar/vocals) and Adam Willis (bass). Despite being aware of them for a while now they've kind of flown under my radar a little with only 2008's split ep with Teenage Bottlerocket receiving much attention. That recently changed though when I heard their new album Sad In The City. I've not been listening to much pop punk recently but this album has wormed it's way into my head. I couldn't honestly say how well it compares with their earlier work though it impresses enough to make me want to go back through their discography and investigate further. I assumed it'd be 11 melody heavy pop punk songs about relationships and heartbreak and while that kind of thing is present it's much darker, deeper and more relevant than that. The first track, Never Take Us Alive, asks "As my country collapses, can I crash on your couch..." whilst the title track begins "The rich man's blood spilled on my shirt, I'm glad he's dead and I hope it hurt" (I'll play this one on this week's Just Some Punk Songs show   https://www.facebook.com/events/282163196344580/ ). Take Me Down seems to deal with a night of dodging the authorities amidst the riots and fires whilst slower paced album closer Went Dyin' doesn't appear to leave us with much hope for the future.

  It's upbeat on the whole musically but the lyrical content is what makes it stand out from the crowd and makes it a lot more than just another disposable cookie cutter pop punk record. It's available on vinyl and cd from Red Scare Industries http://redscare.storenvy.com/ and the label are proclaiming "It's their finest full length and it'll likely go down as one of the top releases in our entire catalog." It's available digitally (with a few songs available to stream) here :   https://broadwaycalls.bandcamp.com/album/sad-in-the-city

  If you're the kind of person who doesn't usually bother with pop punk, give this a go and have a good listen to the lyrics. They've just released a video for their track about having a fear of real or imagined danger from radiation or radioactivity. Singer Tyler had this to say about the song :

“Radiophobia” is about the fear and anger we should all have about being born into a world with the bomb. Fuck Harry Truman. Fuck the military industrial complex.

 Growing up in the shadow of a cooling tower shaped my fear of radiation at a very young age. The nuclear power plant right down the road was a target during the cold war, and when the air raid drill sirens went off they would shake the whole town. The plan was to get on school busses and head towards the coast if there was ever a meltdown at the plant. We knew what a meltdown at a reactor would mean at the age of 7. It would mean never seeing our town and maybe families again. The plant was shut down in the early 90's, but the fear never subsided.


  It's called Radiophobia...