Music Review // Shealagh Rose "Radio Silence"

 

Shealagh Rose does such a great job of crossing between that alternative rock sound of the 1990's and present day dreamy type shoegaze music that I'm not sure which genre fits this song better.  On some levels I hear this as being something like Letters to Cleo or That Dog.  There is a distinct sound like you would've heard on the soundtrack to "10 Things I Hate About You".   But then influences of artists such as Audio Jane make this feel like it's coming right back into the present.

The concept of this song being about "Radio Silence" is something that I think works all too well in music and the fact that I don't feel like someone has embraced it in such a way until now just amazes me as well.   The idea of having the words "radio" and "silence" in your title is rather brilliant because songs should be on the radio and silence is the opposite of song.  This song is one about loss as the lyrics say things such as: "Are we alone for all our lives / Watching people pass by"

While there might be songs out there about silence they aren't quite like this.  The idea of "Radio Silence" is just that feeling of not having spoken with someone for a while, or maybe it's even been longer and you just know you won't ever speak with them again.  This comes out in the chorus, which says: "humming to the radio silence between you and me / 

something about the way that we used to be, you and me"  

Just thinking about someone saying they're going to hum along to that radio silence is levels of pure poetry that we haven't seen in song writing for a very long time, if ever before.  This just works on so many levels because in some ways it can even be defiant, in the sense of "Okay, if you're not going to talk to me, I'm going to talk to myself" as that becomes the sort of hum.  Either way, this all comes to an end with big amounts of distortion and it is not a song to be taken lightly at all.