“…before he uses mind control to incapacitate the doctor, set in time to the song’s chilling jagged electric guitar breakdown.” The Road To Nowhere is enjoyably sinister in sound, with driving drum kit rhythms and cascading stringed and piano melodies providing the perfect backdrop for Cooper’s delicate storytelling vocals. The 2011 track’s pure heart-warming folk vibe, personified by real-life handclaps for percussion, is transformed into an almost industrial-folk ballad.
The lead single from ‘The Family Tree: The Leaves’ is immediately different to his hit single from his first album ‘The Roots’, Welcome Home. It’s a time period of film and photographs,” says Cooper. The third, ‘The Leaves’ (2016), is more cinematic. The second one, ‘The Branches’ (2013), was all about written letters. “Then each record it would get more broad, and it’d expand. The lyrics were all verbal storytelling and it focused on small sounds, a floor tom, an acoustic guitar, and a piano. The first record, ‘The Roots’ (2011), starts the smallest. I didn’t know I was signing up for an eight-year project. “When I started, I thought I would do three EPs, but it ran away with me. “I thought why not do them as records? There could be a set of people and we follow their bloodlines, and instead of passing down genetic traits we could pass down melodic patterns that mutate with each generation. But instead of giving up on his art and literary dream, he turned to music. When he was 19-years-old, Cooper wrote two books, but both were lost in a “cataclysmic hard drive crash”. “I was drawn to ‘East of Eden’ and ‘A Hundred Years of Solitude’, those multi-generational family sagas where you see how one person’s life affects the family line.” “…the visuals as the young boy escapes combining with Cooper’s string arrangements are gorgeous, and as the music comes to an end you can’t help but smile.”Ĭooper says he always wanted to write a book. The story goes the family’s blood flows with special abilities that range from seeing spirits to bringing the dead back to life, and their secrets end up binding them together to protect themselves against the world. The Northcotes have a strange, dark magic in their bloodline, which Cooper impressively conveys through melodic patterns and motifs across the three albums. What fans and music followers may not know however is his album releases, ‘The Family Tree’, over the past decade actually form a concept trilogy, with lyrical and music video themes encompassing both his own supernatural literary work and his childhood experiences. The latest album by Radical Face, ‘The Family Tree: The Leaves’, sees Cooper intertwine the story of the Northcotes, a fictitious 19 th century family, with his own personal accounts. Floridian musician Ben Cooper a.k.a Radical Face is renowned across the world for his intricate and spellbinding music.