The Rosebuds exude quality. Not that everything the North Carolina band has done has been great, but the potential has always been there. From their auspicious debut The Rosebuds Make Out to its bittersweet follow-up Birds Make Good Neighbors and last year's synth-heavy but hardly frilly Night of the Furies, there have been glimmers of greatness in each of the group's three albums, a rapidly expanding catalog that's established the Rosebuds as Merge's most slept-on act since the shockingly overlooked Spent.
The Rosebuds' husband-and-wife team of Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp have credited their progress to a learn-as-you-go-along approach, rarely resting lest all that inspiration go to waste. In fact, Life Like, the band's fourth album of original material in five years, reportedly evolved during what was meant to be a break, self-imposed downtime that found the duo doing what they do best: namely, writing more songs, quickly accumulating enough tracks for another album. One advantage of the quick turn around is that as different as the records sometimes are, you can still hear the connections bridging one to the next.
In the case of Life Like (which is, predictably, good stuff, if not necessarily always the band at its greatest), you can still clearly hear echoes of the minor-key synths that drove Night of the Furies. But you can also hear the group's guitar-driven indie rock roots, as well as the mix of mood and whimsy that made Birds Make Good Neighbors feel so special. Most of all, these tracks sound best in their native contexts: The opening title track could pass for yet more anonymously atmospheric post-punk, at least until it comes on during a late-night drive. Likewise "Cape Fear" could be just another indie-dance track, with its pulsing off-beat hi-hats and simple driving bass line, especially in context with Furies, but the mass of instruments and voices buried in the mix makes it hard to peg definitively as either exultant or mournful, even though it touches on both of those disparate emotional tones.
"Border Guards" is no less mysterious but definitely easier to pin down-- it's as ghostly new wave á la the Church, albeit nowhere near as portentous (or at least only passively so) thanks to Howard's hushed vocals. It's hard to know where the noirish square-dance of "Bow to the Middle" fits into this amorphousness, but it makes self-contained sense nonetheless, just as much as the sentimental paean to road kill "Nice Fox" walks a tightrope between literalness and metaphor to capture some existential truth about the ineffable transience of life. The gauzy Church-isms come to the fore again with "Another Way In" and "Concordia Military Club", before the group reverts to whistle-adorned whimsy with the instrumental "Hello Darling", which also includes snippets of a record Howard's grandfather Bobby D. made for his wife during World War II (the record is dedicated to his memory, as well as to Crisp's Grandma Becky).
Following that sweet palate cleanser, the reverb-draped "Black Hole" and the deceptively sprightly "In the Backyard" (about catching a preacher trying to dig his way to the underworld in the middle of the night) feel like solid if slightly perplexing afterthoughts. The impression is that, were the album tracks all shuffled up and presented in a totally different order, one might easily come away from Life Like with a completely different take or reaction. Indeed, it's an album with its feet on the ground and its head in the clouds, and listening to it is a lot like waiting contentedly in a kind of musical purgatory, happy to be there but still wondering what comes next. It's more of an ellipses pointing you to album number five, but compared to so many other backwards looking records, that's still a pretty great feeling.
