Crashing, psychedelic echo. Bubbling Mellotron. Trippy, double-tracked vocals. Cross-purpose harmonies. There’s plenty about “Spirit Stereo Frequency” to evoke pilled-out pop thrills, but when it all hits within the first 15 seconds of the first song … well, that’s just crazy, man. However, the two men that comprise All Night Radio — Dave Scher and Jimi Hey, both of aggravating retro-saccharinists Beachwood Sparks — manage to pull an entire album’s worth of inventiveness out of this side project and, by the time the near-eight-minute blotter-driven dirge of “All Night Radio” (note: it’s never cool to have a song named after your band, or vice versa) closes out the disc, the two have plowed through a generation’s worth of pop hooks, drippy melodies and mind-numbing reverb.
This article appears in Feb 11-17, 2004.