These days, the Rosebuds sound like a band out of time. They made their debut in 2003, long before their (former) label Merge Records began celebrating anniversaries and even longer before North Carolina was lousy with amazing bands rethinking local and regional musical traditions. During their first decade, they seemed more like one of those boy-girl indie-pop bands, like Mates of State or Georgie James, who were more upbeat than catchy. The Rosebuds were founded on the romantic relationship between Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp, who formed the group when they started dating, married at the height of their success, and kept it going even when they divorced. 2011’s Loud Planes Fly Low was a breakup album as reassertion of creative partnership, although their official-ish follow-up to that album was a full-length cover of Sade’s Love Deluxe that barely featured Crisp at all.
Since then, Crisp enrolled at Columbia and moved to New York, while Howard stayed in North Carolina and released a solo-ish single featuring the Spacebomb Studio band (better known as Matthew E. White’s collective/back-up orchestra). Recently, the duo reconvened at Justin Vernon’s April Base Studio in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to record tracks for their sixth (or seventh, depending on how you count) studio album, Sand + Silence. Even if this isn’t their first album together as exes, it still sounds like they’re figuring out what the band is now and how it operates.
And it sounds pretty much like a Howard solo project, with Crisp hanging back. She adds some piano to a few tracks, some backing vocals, and “handclaps”, but the give and take between them, the sense of friction that bolstered Make Out and Birds Make Good Neighbors, is largely absent on Sand + Silence. Howard indulges genre exercises throughout the album, and his mastery of rock history is impressive, at least for a few songs. Openers and album highlights “In My Teeth” and “Sand + Silence” hinge on intricate earworm choruses and some intriguing rhythmic underpinnings, convincingly updating the ‘70s singer-songwriter mood to the 2010s. It’s part Kenny Loggins, part Steely Dan.
If those don’t seem like the usual touchstones, that may be the point. Much like their superfan/benefactor Vernon, whose Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Hornsby big-ups churned up some hubbub a few years ago, the Rosebuds seem intent on mining historical territory that is largely untouched by most of todays’ indie musicians. Perhaps it’s generational—two veterans drawing inspiration from the music of their own youth—but whatever their motivation, it works well enough and points to a new and arguably more ambitious chapter in the Rosebuds’ career.
But Sand + Silence is built on a sandy, not solid foundation. As the album progresses, the Rosebuds try out all sorts of new ideas but lose all sense of momentum and, ironically, adventure. “Mine Mine Mine” sounds like George Harrison by way of the Love Language, with a chorus that grows more grating with each repetition. “Looking For” is sickly-sweet doo-wop that mistakes cutesy for twee, and “Esse Quam Videri” is clumsy prog-based pop that uses the North Carolina state motto as its title (translated from Latin, the phrase means, “To be, rather than to seem (to be)”). It’s not that these experiments don’t quite work or even that they don’t really cohere into much of a statement. The main problem is that the music is so self-conscious, as most of these songs sound like a band still trying to feel its way forward. The quest is noble and even necessary; the results, much less so.
