By the time I reached my second radio home–my stay in commercial radio didn’t count as a home, I was just renting–I felt a little detached from music. I still listened, I still collected, I still tried, but it was incredibly difficult to stay in tune with new material. Like a lot of people, I suspect, I wound up largely sticking with familiar artists from my college days, even when their releases constituted an ongoing audio demonstration of the concept of diminishing returns. Without the constantly updated wall of new that resides someone in every good college radio station’s broadcast booth, I was increasingly lost.

One of the most common questions I got from the students when I arrived was “What’s your favorite music?” I completely understand this. When you’re working in radio–at least in college radio where the default assumption is that you’re there due to a passion for music–that’s the easiest way to get a shorthand read on someone. I think this was especially true at that point in the earlier days of this decade, since the stratification of genres was reaching a ridiculous level, with everyone intently arguing about the distinction between sadcore and math rock and indie rock and indie pop and emo and on and on.

I was ill-equipped to answer that question, in part because the only response that came to my head–“Good music”–was deemed inadequate. It was also difficult for me because at that point in time, I was far more interested in knowing what the students and the community volunteers were listening to. Going to that station was like gaining reentry to a hidden, magical world after several years away, and I was intensely curious to see how things had changed. What new storefronts had been set up in Brigadoon? The more different the better, which is what eventually brought me to the album Zap the World by Death By Chocolate.

It didn’t really sound like anything else I owned at the time. Sweet, sixties-tinged pop with the same sort of sheen that coats a candy apple, it was almost giddy in its brightness, but also tinged with an irony that comes from the detached vocals of Angela Faye Tillett. This was exactly the sort of thing that I loved when building a radio playlist. It’s adherence to a very unique style can get a little redundant over the course of an album, but dropped into the middle of a set of disparate music, it’s bracing in it’s originality and inventiveness. This is exactly the sort of record I was missing out on when I left radio, and exactly the sort of record I was thrilled to get a chance to know again.

Death By Chocolate, “Magpie”

(Disclaimer: This is posted with the understanding that Zap the World is out of print, and also unavailable through any official downloadable means. Maybe I’m mistaken about that. I didn’t research it very aggressively. If I’m asked to remove if by anyone with due authority to do so, I will gladly comply.)