Album Notes

To their credit, Radio America has made it clear from the beginning that they were in it for the good fight, the slow boil, the long haul. When they show up at the door of your club bearing guitars and singing show tunes, you've got to let 'em in. When they drink all your roommate's beer after your birthday party is already over, you've got to forgive them. Why? Because they write beautiful tunes full of, yeah, sentiment and melody; because they can rhapsodize about geopolitics and Sanskrit texts without sounding like Chris Martin or Anderson Cooper; and because they can play rock and roll as ferociously and as joyously as anyone this side of 1977 ever has.

'Raise High' is a punk rock and roll epic poem. It is a collection of 9 songs inhabited by the pathetic ballads of hepcat boys who roam backlit, boozed streets of New York, London, and Boston, cheating death, storming windmills, scaling bridges, smoking cigarettes and wooing riot girls, all while talking to God. Singers Tom Stuart and Jesse Reno trade lines and choruses over guitar amps as loud as Sherman tanks, while drummer Jay Aubin plays the fuck right out of the Keith-Fucking-Moon school of percussion.

In fact, 'Raise High' would sound like 'Who’s Next' if Pete Townshend had soul...or maybe, 'Up the Bracket' if Carl Barat owned a Marshall amp and Pete Doherty could see straight...or maybe, 'Nevermind' if Kurt Cobain wanted to live...or maybe, 'American Idiot' if it had been produced by Tom Verlaine. Point is, quite simply, it's an American classic; better yet, a Trans-Continental classic. It's music that begs you to not go quietly. It's songwriting that laughs in the face of despair. It's the sound of young men running themselves into the ground for art. It's pure fucking magic is what it is.