The Radiators

The Radiators are a little too rough-hewn to be pigeonholed. It's hillbilly country touched with Texas swing and ragtime with Appalachian folk always looming somewhere, close or distant, in the background. The result is a kind of down-home music. The group's sound is resolutely old-school, but it's also uniquely modern. "Every Dog Has Its Day" sounds like 1930's hot jazz, while their rendition of "Freeborn Man" is flat out pedal-to-the-metal country with some startlingly finger-burning flat-pickin' guitar work. "If You Take Me Back" comes from some distant wrinkle in the fabric of time, with its blistering harmonica and distinct good time blues groove. With a lickety-split guitar/fiddle interplay, The Radiators will convince any non-believer to go right out and buy a pair of cowboy boots! It's easy, of course, to do this uninterestingly. After all, there's no shortage these days of CDs documenting the further downhill slide of what we call "country music." It's difficult to persuade uneducated listeners that they might have a reason to tear themselves away from Top 40 music and come out and experience the sounds of Bill Monroe, Hank Williams Sr. or Jimmy Martin and to remind us of some of the greatest country music that was ever preserved on wax. Happily, The Radiators don't really sound like that generic culture. For all their looking backward, they're too smart to indulge themselves in stale, needless duplication and repetition. They're good, they're having loads of fun and they choose solid material from both source recordings and their own in-the-tradition compositions. These are some nimble-fingered, barn-burnin country boys . . .