||| Live: Radical Face performs May 10 at the Teragram Ballroom. Forthcoming is the sequel, “Everything Costs,” which will arrive as Radical Face embarks on a national tour that kicks off May 10 at the Teragram Ballroom. And it is in his sleep that the boy finally does battle with The Gilded Hand. The boy in “The Road to Nowhere” possesses strange powers (like writing on walls) that only come to him in his sleep. (If the lyric video for “Secrets” doesn’t give you chills, check your pulse.) These children end up working in a factory run by an exploitative man known as “The Gilded Hand” (from Part 2 of the trilogy), whose ulterior motive for employing the kids is to run tests on their blood.
Past vignettes have captured a little girl who walks on water when she sleepwalks, a girl who can bring animals back from the dead and two brothers who have conversations with their dead relatives - kids that are abandoned by their families because of their oddities. Like many of his storylines, Radical Face’s new video for “The Road to Nowhere” focuses on one of the children from the bloodline. Cooper’s orchestrated folk noir and rapt lyricism make for the most compelling of “reads.” The page contains the lyrics of the song The Road to Nowhere by Radical Face. Many of them start to follow him as a kind of spiritual leader afterwards.In March, musical novelist Radical Face - the nom de tune Ben Cooper - released the final of his ambitious album trilogy, “The Family Tree: The Leaves.” As compositional endeavors go, it’s “Roots” compared to most songwriters’ “Love Story.” The albums, including 2011’s “The Roots” and 2013’s “The Branches,” follow the history of the mythological family the Northcotes, who have strange, dark magic in their bloodline, and the characteristics of the principals are articulated in melodic patterns that recur throughout the albums. Not of his choosing, he’s freed all the children that’d been collected to work there. Then one morning, he wakes to find dried blood on his hands and the body of The Gilded Hand on the floor. He has no recollection of writing them, but they always come true. He often wakes to find messages written on the walls of his cell, written in his own hand. “The Road To Nowhere” follows the story of a boy in that same factory who’s abilities only show up in his sleep. Many children who go to work for him are never seen again.
He’s obsessed with tapping into this odd blood and changing the world with it. The Gilded Hand is the nickname of a man who provides these children work in his factory, but only so he can experiment on them. Oftentimes the kids who show strange behaviors are abandoned or forced out of their homes and wind-up working in the industrial part of the city. There are other families with these oddities in their bloodline. Everything from a little girl who walks on water when she sleepwalks, to two brothers who have regular conversations with their dead relatives. The lightning climbing up the walls The finger drawings on the glass The map of those who used to live here Until the gilded hand was broken Often there's a voice in my sleeping mind The words inside my skull at night But once I wake, I cannot read them My bloody hands remain a question mark Sifting through the hiccups of time We'll hide in the bones of the city The engines sing along with. All throughout the Family Tree records, there’s a bloodline that causes fantastic and strange mutations to show up in people. The first song I’m letting out is called “The Road to Nowhere.” It is the follow-up to “The Gilded Hand” off the last album. Radical Face writes on Facebook about “The Road to Nowhere”