Rocketship have long been the type of slightly below-the-radar act that fans connect with in a fiercely personal way. In part this sense of intimacy probably stems from the Sacramento band’s connection with indie pop, which prizes community and handmade sweetness. Like fellow pop kids from Belle and Sebastian to the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Rocketship were inspired by Felt, the ’80s project of reclusive UK indie auteur Lawrence. But Rocketship’s 1996 debut album, A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness, was ambitious and well-crafted to a degree that belied their scene’s reputation for insularity and amateurishness.
Afterward, Rocketship disbanded, and then all but vanished. The sole constant member, singer and guitarist Dustin Reske, followed with a couple of Rocketship albums—1999’s ambient-leaning Garden of Delights, 2006’s more eclectic Here Comes… Rocketship—so low-key that they were off most radars entirely. Now based in Portland, Reske has convened a new lineup for Rocketship’s first album in 13 years, Thanks to You. Arriving again with little traditional publicity push, it’s also Rocketship’s first album with widespread distribution since last century. And it’s shockingly good. Rocketship’s triumphant return still feels intensely personal, only now it’s a bit like reuniting with an old friend and finding they’ve grown into an erudite and beguiling stranger. Whatever else has changed, Reske has shown, once again, that bold aims and modest scale need not be opposed.
The hypnotic organ and crashing guitar on Thanks to You will be familiar to admirers of Rocketship’s early work, but Reske isn’t simply relying on nostalgia. Instead, Rocketship sound more ambitious than ever, the youthful exuberance of the debut giving way to a louche and alluring sophistication. The most obvious difference is the addition of Ellen Osborn, whose past work includes singing in an all-female Bee-Gees cover band, as the lead vocalist on a sizable majority of the album’s 10 songs. She’s both versatile and formidable, her voice crystalline here and feathery there, as the occasion warrants. But most of all, she sounds gamely in control of whatever the compositions throw at her. That’s important, because what’s especially fun about Thanks to You is how packed with ideas these songs are.
A Certain Smile had droning interludes that pointed the way toward the atmospheric instrumentals of its follow-up, Garden of Delights, but Thanks to You goes further. Each of these songs feels as ornately appointed as miniature rooms, with trap doors and spiderwebs that show up as you spend some time living within them. The spacey keys, pinprick bass, and layered harmonies of “Nothing Deep Inside” open up to a French-language spoken-word passage and one of the year’s more poetic guitar solos this side of Big Thief’s “Not.” On “What’s the Use of Books,” a lascivious lunar-lounge cruise suddenly lunges into a stomping, screeching frenzy. There’s yearning dream pop (“A Terrible Fix”), an orchestral-tinged synth workout bringing to mind recent Rest-era Charlotte Gainsbourg (“Outer Otherness”), and whatever you call a song with the jangling riffs of Johnny Marr, the shoegaze whorls of Kevin Shields, and the organ-soaked detachment of Laetitia Sadier (“Broken Musicbox”).
This expanded scope also applies to the songs’ lyrics. “Drunk, I’m always drunk/When I’m with you,” Osborn sings as the autumnal opening track, “Under Streetlights Shadows,” rushes to a start that feels in medias res. “When I asked for rent, you sold my amp,” she chides on “Nothing Deep Inside.” Amid the shrill drum-machine thump of “Milk-Aisle Smiles,” Reske pleads with a lover by way of a reference to Joanna Newsom’s Milk-Eyed Mender, rhyming “laissez faire” with “touch you there.” On “City, Fair,” which veers from Pentangle-style folk to Fleetwood Mac-worthy sing-along, Osborn leaps just just as adroitly from Ren Faire “o’er” to all-too-contemporary “black ops on the street.” It’s a lot, and delving into it all is a treat.
“Thanks to You is for all the fucked up children of the world,” Reske has said. “In my lyrics now I use a broader lexicon, yet the subjects reflect much of the same longing for love and connection through dysfunction and alienation as always.” That constancy is easiest to grasp on the songs where the lexicon, lyrical and musical, is most direct. “I Just Can’t Get Enough of You” lacks the innocence of Rocketship’s classic “I Love You Like the Way That I Used to Do,” but it’s still a giddy rush of noise, melody, and emotion. Or take finale “I Don’t Know Why I Still Love You,” a back-and-forth duet that conjures up the Cure and Saint Etienne meeting at a rave. “Love a lie, you auto-replay ‘One Man Guy’ now,” complains Reske, citing Loudon Wainwright. ”I wave my fuck-it flag, you wear your love like heaven now,” Osborn spits back, quoting Donovan. It’s all as confused and emotionally extreme as a teenager, but as complex and fraught with references as an adult.
Thanks to You is a long way from Rocketship’s irresistible debut single, 1994’s “Hey, Hey Girl,” and yet it’s not so far at all. Reske, who has a business bicycling around Portland and doing yard work with only hand tools, still knows how to make something with lofty artistic goals seem as human and sustainable as cultivating a garden. The fucked-up children of the world might turn out surprisingly well.
