Hockey Night: Rad Zapping

Hockey Night: Rad Zapping
Label: Img
Release Date: 2002
Review Date: 2003

Rad Zapping looks like some freaky Atari age retro electro arty bomb waiting to go off. The disc starts with some super mellow boring synth for about a minute until a sampled voice come on and screams “enough of this shit!” followed by a barrage of noise and metal dirge. Run, don’t walk away from this record. Computers and software have lowered the barrier to recording and releasing music, which is a good thing, as long as you don’t have to listen to it all. Hockey Night is another example. Retro cheesy can be good or bad. Rad Zappping promises “joystick beats” but delivers only the “wah wah wah” sound of Pacman after being caught by one of the ghosts. It’s mostly a mish mash of loops and samples mixed with live instruments and some little kid style singing and a bunch of noise. Some songs have a certain lazy indie rock charm reminiscent of earlier decades but the pseudo rapping and singing through a megaphone distortion are pretty much a giveaway for masking a lack of content. This is the kind of pseudo hippy college band that you would get annoyed at your friends for going to see constantly because they worked at the same crappy restaurant that everyone else does and there wasn’t any out of town bands that night, or they were playing at a house party. It would be good background music if there weren’t any vocals. If you don’t have anything good to say department… Battlestar Scholastica is a good title though. Championship Radio is good too. A lot of the tracks have their moments but there’s just too much poop to wade through.

Online Action: hockeynightmusic.com