Through the above scope, Clinging To A Scheme is the perfect title for Swedish indie outfit The Radio Dept.'s third full-lengther. It's pretty hard to put your finger on exactly what it is that these guys do so spotlessly. I guess you get a clue when listening to the blissful opener 'Domestic Scene', which picks up pace from its discreet, throbbing bass, and then segues into the album's key track, 'Heaven's On Fire'. Shimmering pianos and heavy percussion drives this intensely life-affirming track forwards. Another highlight is the downbeat, swerving 'Never Follow Suit'.
But, as is often the case, it's pretty hard to talk about particularly strong or weak tracks here. Clinging To A Scheme, perhaps more than any of the other albums on my list, is about a certain mood that envelops all the tunes on this 35 minutes short journey through misty, indie-electro euphony. It's the haziness, the scintillating and self-confident understated wit, and the blissful timbres that can only be conceived in the long days and nights of somewhere northerly. It's how 'The Video Dept.' becomes 'Memory Loss' which becomes 'David'. The sudden rant at the opening of 'Heaven's On Fire' is somewhat juxtaposed to The Radio Dept.'s submerged, but sometimes almost excitatory harmonics. It's like Kings of Convenience and Delorean having a kid together, and in all honesty, that is pretty avant-garde.
This is such a low-key album, but what lacks in apparent great gestures, is richly found in all those little things that make shoegaze matter, right through to the tear-jerking closer, 'You've Stopped Making Sense'. And which album would be a better fit for quote as strong and matter-of-factly as when Johan Duncanson exclaims:
When I look at you,
Heaven's on fire.
