RADIO BIRDMAN - Living Eyes

Dunno 'bout you, but I've always felt that Radio Birdman being constantly compared to the MC5 was a tad overstated. They sounded no more like the Five than the Five sounded like the Troggs or the Yardbirds. Certainly the influence is there, particularly in Rob Younger's muscular vocals, but I would contend they had more in common with the Blue Oyster Cult (albeit with far better compositional skills and no irony) than any band from the Motor/Murder City. RB's sound strikes me as being far too streamlined and dare I say, controlled (which makes sense when you take into consideration that band mastermind Deniz Tek became a surgeon not long after this platter was released), to lazily lump 'em in with the Saturn Research-lovin' crew. Could it be the fact that Tek hailed from Ann Arbor?

Quibbles with shiftless rockcrits aside, when "Living Eyes" first appeared in 1981, it had to be mastered from a cassette as the master tapes had mysteriously disappeared from Rockfield Studios in Wales. They were thankfully found over a decade later, and that kids, is where we come in. This reissue has been (obviously) remastered and better yet, resequenced. Now, not only does the band's antipodean thunder wriggle from yer speakers commandingly, it also does so with far more flow than the original. Oh... what could've been. They were beginning to find they own voice with instant classics like "I-94" and "Smith & Wesson Blues"-- songs that straddled the line between their pseudo-punkish debut, "Radios Appear" and the timelessness of their touring mates of the era, the Flamin' Groovies. There's something about this album that screams DRIVING MUSIC! I imagine long, meandering highways surrounded by nothing but wide-open space. Mebbe I should liberate the term, "Desert Rock" from the bong-huffers that listen to cloying Black Sabbath-derivatives like Kyuss?

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