Radio Birdman
Zeno Beach

This is Radio Birdman’s first album of new material in twenty-five years. And it holds up remarkably well. While it doesn’t quite have the fire in the guts that the band carried as ramped-up youth, it does an admirable job of showing they still have passion and nous in expressing themselves through loud punk rock: ‘We’ve Come So Far’, the opening salvo, comes on like an irreverent band of punks running together the best of The Who’s and The Stooges’ back catalogues; ‘You Make It Worse’ is a convincing slab of old-style rock & roll – a solid, stodgy set of power-chords descends the fretboard as the drummer keeps 4/4 time; the beautiful ‘Die Like April’ is Deniz Tek’s pop song on the album, slotting somewhere between punk and the psychedelia of The Church. If anything, this enjoyable record proves that Birdman never put as much distance between rock and punk as some of their contemporaries; Zeno Beach sounds like a band still enjoying the vitality of rock music in its many variations.

by Ben Gook

This is Radio Birdman’s first album of new material in twenty-five years. And it holds up remarkably well. While it doesn’t quite have the fire in the guts that the band carried as ramped-up youth, it does an admirable job of showing they still have passion and nous in expressing themselves through loud punk rock: ‘We’ve Come So Far’, the opening salvo, comes on like an irreverent band of punks running together the best of The Who’s and The Stooges’ back catalogues; ‘You Make It Worse’ is a convincing slab of old-style rock & roll – a solid, stodgy set of power-chords descends the fretboard as the drummer keeps 4/4 time; the beautiful ‘Die Like April’ is Deniz Tek’s pop song on the album, slotting somewhere between punk and the psychedelia of The Church. If anything, this enjoyable record proves that Birdman never put as much distance between rock and punk as some of their contemporaries; Zeno Beach sounds like a band still enjoying the vitality of rock music in its many variations.

by Ben Gook