Red Light Driver, Cabin, Canasta,
The Innate
Radio Radio
Saturday, Dec. 9

Coming to the Radio Radio stage after three hours of audio Valium from The Innate, Louisville’s numbingly boring Cabin, and Chicago’s Canasta — with the stage presence of doped-up nursing home residents playing canasta — Indy’s Red Light Driver single-handedly brought the rock.

Red Light Driver’s frontman Derek Osgood was as always an engaging and likable front guy, letting his passion flow freely, even as music ricocheted between every conceivable genre.

Of course, choosing to record their introductory EP with Paul Mahern at his Bloomington studio probably had more to do with the oddly rambunctious energy that flowed from that stage.

“Paul gets up at 3:15 a.m. to do his yoga and then jogs for a couple hours,” Osgood tells me of the local punk rock icon as we’re reclining in Radio Radio’s swanky new lounge area. “So, by the time he came in to record us, he was just overflowing with energy and ideas. It was hard for us not to pick up on that; I think he has definitely showed us some new ways of doing things with our music.”

Tunes like “Sleep It Off,” “Lights” and “Note To Self” are remarkable songs propelled by drummer Drew and bassist Shimmercore’s tight rhythm section, leaving Jon, the Rickenbacker guitar player, and Osgood, the newly liberated rock star, to spin intricate webs of pop-rock perfection. “It’s probably gonna take another year for people to stop thinking of Red Light Driver as the band that used to be Lunar Event,” Osgood says. However, if they keep doing what they did last Saturday night at Radio Radio, in a year, people won’t even remember Lunar Event.