Tune your analogue radio dial to the wham bam glam of the 1970s and the dark sweeping goth of the 1980s and ready yourself for a gloriously heady extravaganza in the form of the goth/glam fusion from everyone’s favourite purveyors of Bowiehaus, Bela and the Lugosis. If you’re already familiar with the band, the International Radio Star EP is going to be a welcome addition to your burgeoning collection of the bands effervescently boisterous and hugely entertaining goth songs with more than a smattering of glam sugarcoating.
That old familiar squeal & fizz of radio static as you tuned the vintage dials on your old radio fills the airwaves as the EP’s title track kicks in, and it feels like it’s the band’s Radio Ga Ga moment. Crunching guitar riffs come at you with handclaps aplenty before the opening lines hit you with that Murphy/Bowie-esque vocal swagger “you’re on the radio, trying hard to make a show and we believe in you…” a sense of nonchalant self-assured brouhaha emanates throughout the song, in fact throughout the EP. There is an ebullient mood that runs though each of the songs, with the epic bombast and singing guitar lines of Dreams in Pale Blue picking up the baton from Radio Star and running with it, demonstrating a strident strutting conviction with an air of elegant flair but never coming across as too vainglorious.
The headiness intensifies as the band switch up a gear on Swimming with some sleazy garage punk riffs that The Cramps Poison Ivy would have been proud of. Retro sounds are all the rage these days for the likes of the Stranger Things generation, these songs would go down a storm in the Upside Down. I think I may in the past have also likened Bela and the Lugosis on occasion to the greatest ever sons of East Kilbride, and once again on this latest EP, there is a song, this time in the shape of Hartwood Hill, that quietly slips into your psyche in the guise of of a Darklands era Mary Chain song. Hartwood Hill has an understated melancholy and an addictive melody that is hard to shake off once you’ve heard it. There is an element of JAMC’s Head On in penultimate track Embrace While Souls Collide which has the band on overdrive and back up on cloud nine in effusive form with that assured swagger in their stride and pep in their step more apparent than ever. The band return to Hartwood Hill to close the EP, the affecting acoustic rendition of the song ends things in pensive and reflective mood.
If this is a taster for what’s coming later in the form of the bands next album I’m all in.
Bela and The Lugosis – International Radio Star (EP)