Postmodern player-haters be damned. Even if the only path to creating something new is playing cut-and-paste with pre-existing styles and genres, it hasn't all been done before. Exhibit A: Stephen McBean's Pink Mountaintops and Black Mountain projects, which stitch together instantly recognizable references and proudly wear them on their sleeves. But in McBean's case, there's always a singular songwriter behind the pastiche, anchoring the music with something weightier than the sum of its influences.
Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for San Francisco's Society of Rockets. For their sophomore effort, Where the Grass Grows Black, the band sheds the subdued shoegaze of its debut for an unconvincing hodgepodge of classic rock flavors. The album oozes with nostalgia and a sense of uncanny familiarity, but it never rises far above homage. And even if it's stacked with high-octane rock and irrepressible melody, the Rockets draw so liberally from classic sources, there are hardly any surprises. On opener "Tangerines & Cigarettes", the Rockets get their sticky fingers all over 70s-era Stones brass sections. "Out in the Evening" saunters up with all the swagger of T. Rex boogie. And "DrX" strays a short distance from the classic rock playbook: It's a bluesy take on the Jesus and Mary Chain, embellished with some chaotic Ron Asheton licks. But rather than using these stylistic touchstones as building blocks to construct something all its own, the Rockets seem content to settle for a kind of classic rock paint-by-numbers act.
The best moments on Where the Grass Grows Black are when the band revisits the lulling and elegiac tone of Sunset Homes. "Suicide Summer" is a velvety two-chord dirge backed by restrained floor toms. Bandleader Joshua Babcock leads a call-and-response vocal, cataloging a summer's worth of "small suicides"-- from the banal ("all the dishes in the sink") to the nauseatingly starry-eyed ("all the broken believers"). These exchanges build slowly before they segue into a chorus of soaring harmonies and crisp cymbal crashes.
The last two songs find the Rockets sounding more like itself than a cover band. With its warm organ tones, reverb-soaked vocals and sustained strings, "The Longest Mile You'll Ever Walk" is the album's most ethereal song-- and one that, frustratingly, lasts less than two minutes. On the obligatory epic closer, "Old Glory", the Rockets finally use the sonic elements of the album to forge an individual sound. After an intro in which meandering horn phrases snake around each other, the band launches into its most languorous number, providing a more fitting backdrop for Babcock's delicate vocals (despite his ham-fisted anti-war lyrics). It's a relief for the listener and a revelatory moment for the band, as if it had to endure an album's worth of false steps and classic rock copycatting to carve out a space to call its own.
