Radar Eyes didn’t come together by accident, but the band probably owes its continued existence to chance. In late 2006 drummer Shelley Zawadzki and guitarist-vocalists Nathan Luecking and Anthony Cozzi were all playing in an aggressive local noise-punk band called Night of the Hunter, which had embarked on a seemingly cursed recording project. Working with engineer Kenny Rasmussen, probably best known at the time as the bassist for No Funeral, they produced not the album they’d intended to but instead a series of dead reel-to-reel machines, all of which had expired during the sessions. They were already frustrated with the way the band was going and had started a three-piece side project that was toying with a psychedelia-drenched strain of garage rock when Night of the Hunter front man Jeremy Kitchen snapped an anterior cruciate ligament onstage at the Mutiny in late 2007. The side project, which had just played its first show as Radar Eyes, stepped in to play a gig that Night of the Hunter had booked. Soon the first band split up altogether.
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It’s kind of a dark origin story, but the inspiration behind Radar Eyes‘ music is even darker. “Anthony and I were phasing out of deep depressions at alternating times,” explains Luecking, 27, a grad student in social work at the University of Chicago who works at a runaway hotline call center. “We were kind of burnt out on punk rock and more sinister music and wanted to play something more poppy and fun.” Radar Eyes sound the way they do because “we needed something to keep our spirits up and avoid suicide.”
Luecking and Cozzi, 34, a union bricklayer who’s between jobs and working door at the Empty Bottle, do all the songwriting for Radar Eyes. Luecking had only just begun working on his own material when the band started, and Cozzi had mostly limited himself to bedroom four-track sessions. But now they each bring songs to the group more or less finished—Luecking’s tend to be poppier, Cozzi’s more psychedelic. In part this is a reaction against Night of the Hunter’s process, which consisted largely of jamming until somebody came up with something worth keeping.
Radar Eyes are definitely more pop than punk, but despite the candylike hooks the music hasn’t totally shaken the grimness it was supposed to ward off. The contrast between the two is probably more powerful than either alone could ever be. “I was really messed up about seven or eight years ago,” Cozzi says. “Lots of drugs and stuff like that. A lot of the songs lyricwise come out of that stuff. I stopped getting fucked up all the time, but I still think like that—I still have those thoughts, really negative and dark thoughts. That’s where a lot of the writing has come from. It was always kind of like, I’m alone in the world and everything’s fucked up and everyone’s out to get me. I try to throw a bright side in, maybe a smidgen of ‘everything’s OK.’”
Sat 6/26, 9 PM, Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western, 773-276-3600 or 866-468-3401, $8, 21+.
