It felt like only a matter of time before Frankie Rose evolved from a bright light in New York indie rock to a legitimate star and unsurprisingly, it happened on last year’s Interstellar, the first album attributed to her and her alone. The surprising part was how she shifted from the more character-driven garage-rock she helped create with Dum Dum Girls, Vivian Girls, and the Outs to romanticized, Reagan-era dream-pop, a genre that all but requires putting form before flair (see also: DIIV, Wild Nothing, Lotus Plaza). The main lyric in the chorus of Interstellar highlight “Know Me” actually went “don’t know me,” which felt apt for a record with a sharp and subtly diverse array of songs that revealed the range of Rose’s talent but not much about herself. Unfortunately, by making an exact replica of Interstellar minus the sharp and subtly diverse array of songs, Herein Wild reveals the limitations of that range while turning its predecessor’s personality void from a cost of doing business into a serious liability.
It’s futile to listen to Herein Wild without succumbing the urge to compare it to its predecessor; in fact, the sequencing is so similar that it damn near dares you to do so on a track-by-track basis. As with “Interstellar”, the leadoff here boasts a scene-chewing verse where Rose sings with the timbre of a touchtone phone before an anticipatory, on-the-one bass-drum thump guides her out of the vaporous reverb. Only you lose the knee-buckling dynamics of “Interstellar” and instead get a smooth ascent to one of Herein Wild’s 10 lilting and lightly pitched choruses. As with “Gospel/Grace”, the third song here is sleek and silvery indie-pop, but instead of flowing like liquid mercury like its Interstellar equivalent, “Into the Blue” sits in place like a glob of puffy glitter paint. Herein Wild is, once again, identically bisected by a beatless vocal showcase; previously, “Pair of Wings” wisely used Rose’s voice for texture, looping and weaving soft and silken harmonies. “Cliffs As High” at least acknowledges a new influence in Björk by demonstrating a similar obsession with altitude and surprisingly angular melody. But it’s the exact opposite of “Hyperballad” in every conceivable way, dozing off waiting for a more forceful vocalist who can counter its somnambulant string arrangement.
We could seriously do this for all 10 songs, but lead single “Sorrow” about sums up the disassociation between her ambitions to sound bigger and smaller (i.e., more ostensibly “personal”) at the same time. Ignore, if you can, how “Sorrow” has the same drum pattern as “Know Me”, since that song pretty much nicked its own from the Cure’s “Close to Me”, a sort of “Be My Baby” public domain entity for artists of this stripe. It’s also easy to condone the lyrics throughout Herein Wild trying to express more individual desires through the same water/dream/sky vocabulary that kept Interstellar so purposefully vague. More important is how “Sorrow” gives you an idea of what Rose meant when discussing the influence of film soundtracks on Herein Wild, in that there are real strings rather than synthesizers and songs not entirely indebted to strict verse/chorus structure. Yet the added orchestration adds bulk rather than depth; the strings arrive exactly when you’d expect and add another layer of syrupy sheen rather than counterpoint, the bridge doesn’t introduce any new melody or dynamic shift and the fake fade-out just kills time.
The misallocation of resources is even more pronounced when Rose tries to hearken back to Interstellar’s rawest rock song (“Night Swim”). “The Depths” makes a literal callback with its introductory lyric (“swimming across the water”), and its murky, bass-driven arrangement at least recalls a different iteration of the Cure (Pornography rather than Head on the Door). But even when it tries to menace, the overwhelming takeaway from Herein Wild is just how edgeless it is, bearing the consistency, texture and sickly sweetness of a circus peanut.
It’s not like Frankie Rose forgot how to write a catchy song and there are enough here where you wonder if it would be heard as “promising,” had it come from a new band as opposed to someone more familiar. But that’s the paradox of Herein Wild: it might be subject to less scrutiny had it not followed Interstellar, but then again, it might not be subject to scrutiny at all, and simply filed away with any other competent and unexceptional dream-pop. Besides, what’s the point of pretending Interstellar doesn’t exist when Herein Wild does the exact opposite? As the saying goes, the strict imitation of Herein Wild sincerely flatters its predecessor; it just doesn’t do the same for the person who made it.
