Radar Eyes: Radar Eyes

Heavy, red-needle, fuzzed-out, lo-fi garage/psych is the order of the day for Radar Eyes, and odds are if those adjectives jump out at you, you’ve probably got a few dozen records — from Mike Sniper’s Blank Dogs to Wavves to, I dunno, the Velvet Underground — that render Radar Eyes redundant. Not that the band doesn’t do this stuff well: from the Nuggets-y keyboard of opener “In Love”, or the mutant surf guitar and phat bass of “Secrets”, to the fact that the whole album sounds like it was recorded in an airplane hangar with frontman Anthony Cozzi about 10 feet away from the mic, all the signifiers are here, the group thoroughly nailing the aesthetic, but only thrumming post-punk closer “Side of the Road” manages any resonance or points a way out of the haze. Useful chiefly as a genre exercise.