On Friday the Empty Bottle hosts a show by Radioactivity, a relatively new band from the incestuous garage-punk scene in Denton, Texas. Front man and chief songwriter Jeff Burke used to play in the Marked Men, who split in 2009 after four top-notch albums; from 2010 till 2012 he led a group in Mito, Japan, called the Novice, which became Radioactivity when he returned home and put together a new Texan lineup. Mark Ryan, also of the Marked Men, joined Radioactivity alongside two-thirds of Bad Sports, Daniel Fried and Gregory Rutherford.
- Courtesy the band’s Facebook page
- Radioactivity visit Arizona’s most notorious roadside attraction.
And that’s why I brought this up in the first place—to me, those ties (and the vision and labor that went into them) symbolize the perfectionism and attention to detail in the Reds’ music, qualities that Burke brought with him into the Marked Men and now Radioactivity. Lots of folks think garage punk is supposed to be dumb and simple, but Burke’s bands prove just how much craft and intelligence this boneheaded genre can absorb without ceasing to be itself.
