"Asleep At Heaven's Gate" (Brushfire) Sounds like: Everything you've already heard before and wouldn't care to listen to again. Grade: C+
Disappointingly, Rogue Wave sounds nothing like one. In fact, listening to too much of them invites prayers for just that.
Rogue Wave was born in 2002 of front man and guitarist Zach Rogue's restlessness within his former band, the Desoto Reds, though none such independent spirit remains in his band's truly unremarkable third album. Sadly, the only yearning detectable on the record seems to be that of Rogue's desperate want to be tucked into the queue of a Zach Braff movie sound track.
The album opens with "Harmonium," a track that sounds much like its melodies were constructed using Coldplay's "Clocks" and Broken Social Scene's "Lover's Spit" as blueprints. What saves the track as a formidable opener is someone's good sense to turn up the guitars and strum like hell until the umpteenth repetition of the chorus, and song, is finished. The following track, "Like I Needed," continues the relatively peppy popping of the opener, falling victim to the same urbane ending as its predecessor.
"Lake Michigan," easily the highlight of the album, is where Rogue Wave makes no apologies about treading steadily down a path heavily treaded before, lined with predictable vocal harmonies and tired percussive and electric flourishes in the track's climactic minute.
"Fantasies" is where the album really hits bottom. While it may get your subconscious toes tapping and Rogue's lilting lyrics bouncing around in your head a bit, the song is insufferably disengaging, especially after the first half of the album. From then on, the second half of the album loses what little potency and pulse it had in the beginning.
The album comes to a much welcome end with the ironically titled "Cheaper Than Therapy," complete with a pedagogical spoken-word intro and soft, moaning organ. It sounds as though Rogue couldn't take his own music any longer and decided to bury it and be done with it all, the closing track the morose eulogy of a send off, leaving the listener as cold as Rogue's frozen-over well of creativity.
That's not to say that all dreamy, repetitive pop that aspires to be nothing more than air-wave filler and brain cell killer is worthless - there's a time and place for all that - but it can be made more interesting than Rogue and his cookie-cutter band have made it here. There's no reason why a band so adept at playing their instruments should make such insipid music other than their sheer lack of ingenuity. What's technical ability without artistic vision? Rogue Wave, apparently.
In their defense, the band's album is traditionally beautiful and has all the makings of a crowd pleaser. But, as the adage goes, what is popular is not always right or, in this case, worthy of critical mention, and while Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" is widely and historically considered a masterpiece, the distorted and jagged works of Monet and Picasso sparked discussion and movements and are creative milestones in their own right.
As a whole, the album is calming, much in the same way that popping Xanax and chasing it with mid-morning cocktails is calming. If your liver needs a break, it's nice to know that Rogue Wave has composed the equivalent of completely losing your mental faculties for an hour.
-HILARY CROWE
The camps have divided themselves pretty evenly in the case of Pearl Jam's lead singer, Eddie Vedder. Some proclaim him rock god while others disclaim him as anything but.
There are a few others, though, who believe Vedder's voice is better suited for the crooner ballad. Because Pearl Jam's music so rarely caters to the soft rock tunes, no one can really say for sure whether these critics are totally correct.
That is until Vedder released this first solo album, which also functions as the sound track to the Sean Penn-directed "Into The Wild." The Pearl Jam singer's voice expands, uninhibited by electrical instrument overload. He's allowed to sing softly, even hum quietly. He's given a chance to fill soulful choruses with his tender but gravelly vocal. And, perhaps more importantly, he's given the chance to change listeners' minds.
All those Vedder detractors, who could never stand his yelping vocals over Pearl Jam's punk-meets-'70s-hard-rock tracks like "Spin The Black Circle," may find themselves bemused by this disc. Vedder's voice is poised with compassion and warmth, the full, mostly acoustic instrumentation accentuating these qualities.
Just listen to "No Ceiling." Accompanied by banjo and soft drumming, Vedder's voice is transformed and transfixing. The following song, "Far Behind," drives with the same catchy riffs that are heard on a Pearl Jam song - except that they're all acoustic. Vedder's voice plows through, but instead of straining to be heard, it's tempered and in control.
His cover of "Hard Sun," from Canadian rock group Indio, stirs up the most excitement on this disc. The sing-along chorus, the whip-cracks plus percussion and the glowing acoustic accompaniment set this song off as the album's centerpiece. What makes it even better: Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney provides backing vocals.
Unfortunately, "Into The Wild" suffers from a lack of substance. The entire disc clocks in at just over 30 minutes, and several tracks like "Tuolumne" and "The Wolf" only bring atmospherics to the mix.
Had Vedder developed this album a little more, he would have had a real winner. But who knows whether it was his fault for not doing so? Perhaps Penn's movie didn't require any more music than what's provided here.
-STEPHEN TRINGALI
There's this amazing episode of "120 Minutes," one of the gems of MTV's late '80s programming, where Thurston Moore interviews Beck.
A legend in his own time, Moore introduces himself after every break as "Thurston of Sonic Youth," one of the most successful underground American rock bands at the time. The interview moves on awkwardly, but something about it feels infinitely cool. Moore describes the first time he saw Beck, at some backyard gig in L.A. where there was somehow a rainstorm of goose feathers. The point is, Moore can't interview worth a damn. But he is just seething with street cred that stresses he can do whatever he wants.
On "Trees Outside The Academy," Moore's first solo effort since 1995's "Psychic Hearts," the album takes a turn from the noise of his former projects to structured, lyric-driven songs. The change is jarring - one expects the experimentation of "Free Noise Among Friends" on all of the album's tracks - but welcome. We know that Moore can build a wall of sound and let it break, but on "Trees" we learn that he can write introspective rock songs as well.
Supported by violinist Samara Lubelski on most of the album's tracks, "Trees" is at times a quiet and brooding album, where every strum and finger-picked note feels calculated and part of some hole. The acoustic strums, when paired with Lubelski's violin, makes songs beautiful in their simplicity - like "The Shape Is In A Trance" - where Sonic Youth's shivering noise soundscapes were attractive in their daring instrumentation.
But don't be mistaken. "Trees" does indeed rock. By the end of the album, the energy has built up. The thrashy riff on the instrumental title track is cleaner than Moore's previous work, but guttural enough to keep your head bobbing. The guitar solo three minutes in is worth the hum-drumness of the track's acoustic noodlings, building into a deafening crescendo of acoustic and electric guitar tracks layered over Sonic Youth's Steve Shelley on drums. There's a bonus track, "Thurston@13," which is an audio recording of Moore banging things onto a table as he narrates. It's a rare look into the mind of one of experimental rock's greatest visionaries. As the album draws to a close, the young Moore says into his tape recorder, "What you have heard is me wasting time, again asking myself deep inside, 'Why the fuck am I doing this?'" Why is he doing this? Because he's Thurston Moore, and he can do whatever he wants. -JEFF LAMBERT
