Frankie Rose
Interstellar (Slumberland)

It must be hard to record a “highly anticipated” record. Frankie Rose has already established herself with Vivian Girls and Dum Dum Girls. Both bands remind listeners that girls can make smart rock music that not only dialogues with the art world (Vivian Girls were named after the magnum opus of outsider artist Henry Darger), but also ascribes to the punk ethos play it again and play it loud. She followed up those collaborations with a kick-ass solo record that covered an Arthur Russell tune. Understandably, the hype for Frankie Rose’s Interstellar was all over the Internet before the record was released in February.

This Frankie Rose record is different from Rose’s first solo album, recorded under the name Frankie Rose and the Outs. The sound on Interstellar is saturated in synth-pop, done in both dance-y and melodic varieties. The stand-out dance single is “Know Me.” Picture a 21st century Molly Ringwald, strong-willed and naïve, dancing alone in her collage-covered bedroom, surrounded by pictures of Jay Reatard and Sonic Youth. While there are some notable guitar riffs and bass lines on songs like “Had We Had It” and “Moon in My Mind,” the record features a lot of Rose’s oh, oh, oh-ing—essentially not a lot of substance. “Pair of Wings,” an adaptation of “Wings to Fly” by Wu Li Leung, repeats, over a simple, radiating, ambient backdrop, “All that I want is a pair of wings to fly / Into the blue of the wide open sky / Show me your scars / I‘ll show you mine / Perched out of the city / On a pair of power lines.” It would be difficult to make a familiar “pair of wings” image original or meaningful, but it doesn’t sound like Rose is self-conscious about this.

Interstellar feels like a reprieve. The tonal qualities and ambience of the synthesizers recur throughout the record. The opening track invites listeners to embark on an “interstellar highway,” to travel along a crafted and contrived cosmic conveyor belt, and boasts how cool the ride is going to be. Like Disneyworld’s Space Mountain, where the lights and soundtrack compliment the riders’ physical experience on the roller coaster, the trip has been planned for maximum entertainment. The riders only experience the illusion of surprise or suspense—no sooner does the ride begin than it ends. Interstellar is a 10-song LP that clocks in at just over 30 minutes—before you know it, the record is over, the ride is done. And while the thrill of chasing the ephemeral can be appealing, after a while even the most ardent thrill seeker will move on to the next big thing. On Interstellar, Rose moves to center stage, rearranging the traditional band dynamics that were at the forefront of the other groups in which she’s played. It would be wrong to say the record suffers because of it—Interstellar simply lacks the external dialogues for which her music has become known.

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Laura Gibson
La Grande (Barsuk; Jealous Butcher)

I recently heard someone on NPR use the term “desert noir” to describe the band Calexico. Having never heard the term before, I immediately took to it. I liked the juxtaposition of the words, the barren visual connotation of the desert with the lush, velvety danger of noir. It seemed like an accurate way to describe the feeling of a desert highway’s cooling asphalt as the day changes to night and the nothingness gets disguised by the dark, leaving one with the feeling that a stranger could be very close by, plotting your demise.

“La Grande,” the single from Laura Gibson’s eponymous album, epitomizes desert noir. The tempo of the song matches that of a nervous heartbeat, the excitement of charging off into the unknown. You can “smell sage burn” in the twangy phrasing of the guitar. While the rest of the record doesn’t keep the same pace, it makes lateral shifts in the same spirit, like spider-veined cracks in the brown and dry and dusty desert ground. “Skin, Warming Skin” has reoccurring 7th-chord guitar parts, and “The Rushing Dark” lends a campfire vibe to the record, with a Theremin-like saw echoing behind the rhythm. This visually corresponds to the cover of La Grande, and contributes to the desert noir atmosphere. Variations on this theme occur on songs like “Lion/Lamb” and “Red Moon,” both of which sound more like desert samba, egg shakers and all. Gibson’s voice is always accompanied by layers of effects that paint her voice into the audio landscape.

Gibson’s songs often express an emotional resignation without being melodramatic. There is no grief in the “seeds that could not have been sown,” as Gibson sings on “Crow/Swallow.” “The Fire” is both “saddened with brave ideas” and able to promise that “if you’re high as the sun I will not question your wings.” This stark and stoic phrasing compliments the mood Gibson fosters on La Grande. There is nowhere to hide in the desert.

The poet Catherine Wagner writes, “Things moralize to meet / my expectations because I want advice / on how to live.” By a similar logic, Gibson makes her conviction that “time is not against us” sound believable. Of course time is against us. It is nothing if not against us. But there is a certain charm and tenderness to pretending otherwise.

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Sean Rowe
Magic (Collar City)

It might be hard to get past the first song on Sean Rowe’s Magic it if you have a real aversion to guitar-based songs written in what is commonly referred to as “adult contemporary” style: competent music writing and playing, extending just to the edge of what is comfortable. In other words, it’s as risky as it can get without having to be risky. And while the music itself on Magic doesn’t transcend any musical boundaries, Rowe’s voice adds a complexity and uniqueness that distinguish the album.

Rowe sings in the deepest register I’ve ever heard for this genre of music. The only other singer I can think to compare Rowe to is Barry White, but the two employ such different styles of singing in such different musical contexts that any comparison would be unjust. Rowe’s voice is such a surprise that on first listen it can be off-putting to unprepared listeners. But this combination of deep baritone vocals and sentimental guitar rock creates the dark overtones that shadow this record.

That first song, “Surprise,” is the only certifiable love song on the record. Look up videos of Sean Rowe on YouTube, and you’ll find a bride and groom dancing their first dance to it. As Rowe sings “I thought love was just a strip mall baby, you are a surprise” I can’t help but be impressed by this cynicism cum romance. Rowe takes us swiftly through the notion that love is just a bland suburban oasis full of Subways and nail salons to our arrival at genuine sentiment. And while the rest of the record explores dynamic experiences beyond the initial relief of love, this song acts as an anchor for everything that follows.

Sean Rowe’s Magic is a place where “life is like a liquid,” where “hearts [are] waiting like rifles,” where “the sound of thunder covers up [your] eyes,” where “[you] listen hard for the voice of god and [you] don’t hear nothing at all,” where you begrudgingly ask questions like, “What if I was wrong? What if the world was right?” The tenor of Rowe’s vocals helps express a musical depth that could easily be passed over with a more conventional delivery. How else could one tolerate lyrics like “When your heart is broke, when your eyes are wet” sung over and over, or “I am man” sung with the utmost naked sincerity? Such clichéd phrasing and earnest observation usually repel me, but Rowe’s delivery wins me over. The songs on Magic present lyrical and emotional clichés as though there couldn’t have been a better way to say any of it.

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Angel Olsen
Strange Cacti (Bathetic Records)

Reverb and other effects make Angel Olsen’s voice, accompanied only by guitar, sound otherworldly on Strange Cacti. Her location in proximity to our listening echoes as if from another dimension. Pop songs are usually defined as brief, catchy/accessible/repetitive melodies that more often than not deal in matters of the heart. Buddy Holly used his guitar to create quick, playful songs about both the objects of his affection and the objects that evade his affection. To that end so did Roy Orbinson, using his guitar to carry his heart’s elation/ache, letting it ring with his voice. One only needs to listen to the finale of Orbinson’s “Crying” to know what I’m talking about. And while on first listen it might be hard to detect similarities on Olsen’s six song EP, they are there.

You first hear a bunch of reverb, the voice of a girl singing from the bottom of a well, the voice of a girl singing through the vents in the floor. Her expansive vocal range is nothing if not cosmic. This is not what a pop song is supposed to sound like. But there is the guitar. Underneath it all there is the guitar, repeating in its simple progressions. Underneath it all there is the ache of love.

Olsen sings on “Some Things Cosmic” that she can almost feel her soul leave her body when she looks at her other. She goes on to sing, “I want to be naked. I don’t mean my body,” and you can almost picture a piece of buoyed light in the Milky Way, with its own limitless affections. Vocal effects are used as a way to represent and convey the hyperventilation and exacerbation of what it is to connect with another—the revelation of “I used to think I was the only one” sung over and over in “If It’s Alive It Will.” Even a darker song like “Creator/Destroyer,” with the last line, “Fuck you and yours,” has a chorus of “do-do-dos” like an oldies tune would. It seems to come from a pit of utter dejection, just as she warned in an earlier song: “Just know the height you reach is the distance you could fall.”  These are complex pop songs that revel in the uncontrollable spiral of endorphins and love while always brimming with unwanted consequences, and always emanating from a single guitar and voice.

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Cass McCombs
Humor Risk (Domino)

The thing I have noticed about Cass McCombs, or rather the thing I think is a telling parallel to his music, is that he never really looks the same in pictures. I mean, it’s not like he just looks a little bit different from picture to picture; he looks radically different. Soft features in one photo, rough and scratchy in the next. Hair a Kurt Cobain-type length with a wave. Next a tight Morrissey cut with a crimped top. And it’s not that it matters what McCombs looks like, rather that the change in appearance admits a kind of fluency, a kind of not knowing what’s going to come next, a kind of perpetual surprise as to what things will look like as time passes.

Not that this is reason enough to like someone’s music, but if you listen to McCombs’ records, none of them really sound like the others. Sure some of the harmonies overlap, as does some of the subject matter, but as far as whole records go, they all seem to come from a different place. The same can be said of Humor Risk, the second full-length album McCombs released this calendar year. Humor Risk has a bit more of a rock’n’roll feel than previous records. He gets the guitars going with the first song “Love Thine Enemy” and brings them back toward the end of the album in “Mystery Mail.”  But these aren’t the songs on the record that stand out, or rather, they do stand out but by doing so overshadow some of the more introspective songs.

In an interview with Pitchfork, McCombs says something about how “the individual only distracts from the universal.” In regard to music I think of this statement as being a little seedling for psalm, an invitation for something holy to enter the song for a short time. “The Living Word” and “Robin Egg Blue” both do this through their lyrics, through the melody McCombs sings and the way the guitar sings with him. Like prayer, there is beautiful repetition in both of these songs: “Let me speak the living word/ the living word/ the living word”; “Saint Jude, when will I learn/ … / What’s done is done, done, what’s done is done.” I love the way McCombs includes mention of Lao Tzu speaking to Confucius, taking the idea of the word of God and giving it a broader scope. As for Saint Jude, well he is the saint of lost causes and despair, and whoever you are, despair will show up at some time or another. And how does one transcend despair? By telling and hearing stories. By finding ways to transcend ourselves.

McCombs won’t discuss religion in interviews, but there is a healthy amount of contemplation and humanism going on in these songs. It is this type of contemplation that can make an artist undefinable, or rather naïve in the way each song or album is approached in earnest, like any first approach. And perhaps for McCombs the body (or its appearance) becomes a diagnostic for these internal changes. And he says in “Love Thine Enemy,” “Nothing about my life could be called insincere.” Taking its cue from the album’s title, sincerity is nothing if not a risk.

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Eleanor Friedberger
Last Summer (Merge)

Last Summer, the first solo release from Eleanor Friedberger, half of the Brooklyn duo The Fiery Furnaces, is, for better or for worse, a summer record. And being that the summer in question is last summer, there is a reflective quality to the songs, with lyrics that employ common summer activities/locales like bike riding, Coney Island, and the Cyclone.  Friedberger uses these “summer” places to recall past events and gauge their meaning a year later. And similar to her songwriting for The Fiery Furnances, the lyrics can be long and kind of idiosyncratic and intensely specific, so much so that some of the songs on this record seem to drag on even though only one breaks the five-minute mark.

There are several crazy successful songs on Last Summer, songs that make me want to hear them again, and again, and again, as soon as they are over. “My Mistakes,” “I Won’t Fall Apart on You Tonight,” and “Early Earthquake” all have a sense of universal placeness, of emotional commonality paired with a catchy beat.  These are songs for all of our summers and all of their themes: mistakes, love, promises, etc. I probably listened to “My Mistakes” about 20 times the first time I heard it just because it was so sonically and cyclically satisfying.  The line “I hope I don’t crash like that night last summer” carries a double meaning: the physical bike crash and the emotional crash of failed or failing relationships, set to a bouncy beat, a toy piano, and an intense sax solo.

That said, some of the songs on this record concern themselves with more mundane things: one’s email inbox, shaving off one’s hair, long day-in-the-life stories a la the fourth song, “Scenes from Bensonhurst.”  This song feels drawn out because there is such detail to the lyrics, and these kinds of details are really only as interesting as someone else’s dreams can be interesting.  “Roosevelt Island” is more successful in that it has a funky bass line, along with a catchy chorus that justifies its quirky meandering.  There are just enough relatable feelings in the song to make you want to hear it over and over again, even if the same can’t be said for the album as a whole.

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