After losing his Silicon Valley job in the early-'00s dotcom bust, Zach Schwartz debuted his Rogue Wave project in 2002, during the indie-pop boom. Like his Shins-era peers, Schwartz, who goes by Zach Rogue, was a sensitive songwriter who politely aired grievances with wayward friends, reckless parents, and departed partners in a way that shone a warm light on his personal losses. It was the redemptive aspect that attracted TV music scouts, and the scouts who helped break the band. But after syncs in shows like "The O.C.," the label Sub Pop, who had signed the group after Rogue’s lo-fi solo debut, mysteriously dropped them. A decade later, following increasingly crisp and radio-ready LPs, sixth album Delusions of Grand Fur finds the California band at a crossroads from which every path looks like a cul-de-sac.
Rogue, a self-effacing character, would be the first to concede his modest prospects. He’s recently professed his newfound obsession with hip-hop and electronic music, lamenting that breakout stars like Kendrick Lamar are rare beacons at a time when "[so] many artists rising to the top are garbage." Where 2010’s Permalight felt like a rudimentary synthpop dalliance, Delusions of Grand Fur is a chance for Rogue Wave to bust open the indie-pop model, inspect the components, and rebuild from scratch. That chance goes untaken and, seemingly, unobserved. The record is chronically mild—it neither pulls off nor attempts songwriting acrobatics. Highlights like "Endless Supply" and "Take It Slow" are pastoral and pretty, vast yet cosy, with a vague sense of battles won. But for all the formula tweaks and threads of political intent—"In the vast expanse of governments/ I think you’re gonna burn," Rogue sings, Leonard Cohen-like, on "Look at Me"—Rogue and Pat Spurgeon have redrafted their gentle-and-epic songwriting orthodoxy, when what it needed was a revolution.
A sign of the record’s impasse is its cover, a defaced, hollow-eyed image by the artist Matthew Craven of Confederate general P. G. T. Beauregard. That a decorated racist seemed fitting art for an otherwise harmless pop record feels instructive: Rogue has thoughtful intentions—his reading concerns white America’s blindness to its past, particularly given the present GOP agenda—but overlooks the possibility that album sleeves simply aren’t the best place to put Confederate generals in 2016. Like the album’s lyrics, it presents a potent idea in a manner just broad and ambiguous enough to ring hollow.
It’s a shame, because Rogue has a gift for making art of his uncertainties. On 2003’s "Postage Stamp World," he sang, "You can all get in line/ And lick my behind"—a comically sheepish threat that felt somehow revealing. Now, apprehensive of both world-weariness and quixotic optimism, his songwriting is compromised precisely by its faith in compromise. "Hey, in the morning/ Can’t get you off my mind," goes a typically airy lyric from "In the Morning," a nicely crafted anthem about the trials of marriage. But never does the music submit to raw emotion, relay the breathless rush of dreams chased or the complexities that, in a grim political climate, make retreating into the love of one’s family such a terrifying, guilty temptation. As much as the record flirts with reinvention—personal, political, musical—its modest ambition sounds exactly like complacency.
