Rogue Wave recently exploded onto the national stage with their Sub Pop debut, Out of the Shadow. When an unknown band erupts from anonymity and begins garnering rave reviews in grassroots webzines and established glossy print mags alike, cynical consumers, steeped in suspicion of market manipulation and mainstream postmodernism, immediately become wary and guarded-- the animal that has been mistreated shying away from the friendly hand. Sometimes, breakout bands have indeed been "sold" with ingenious marketing pushes and lifestyle branding techniques, but more often, the seemingly abrupt success is the product of a long and invisible series of missteps, failures, minor triumphs, and most importantly, years of unheralded toil and sweat. Such is the trajectory of Rogue Wave.
In early 2002, the deflating dot-com bubble left musician Zach Schwartz jobless and spiritually bankrupt. What he initially perceived as a disaster, however, was a masquerading boon: The layoff led directly to his Sub Pop debut. A member of the Bay Area indie group Desoto Reds at the time, Schwartz left Oakland for New York, California's dark mirror, to record a few songs with his friend, producer Bill Racine. He returned to the Bay Area with an entire album.
The bicoastal milieu of Out of the Shadow is apparent: It reflects both a lush, sunny "California Dreamin'" temperament, and Gotham's grimy, melancholic disposition. That Schwartz wrote and recorded Out of the Shadow by himself also seems fitting: It's lonely and remote in the vein of Oh, Inverted World, and vividly evokes one man sitting alone amid the finely wrought, baroquely detailed, and ultimately imprisoning architecture he's constructed around himself, contemplating his failure to include an exit door.
Upon returning to California, Schwartz quit Desoto Reds, changed his last name to "Rogue," and placed an ad for musicians on Craig's List. He found drummer/sampler Pat Spurgeon, bassist Sonya Westcott, and guitarist/keyboardist Gram Lebron. By all credible reports, the new quartet almost literally fell in love with one another. Soon, the members had added tactful motes of Moog, thin wires of lap steel, and square-shouldered vocal harmonies to Schwartz's tapes.
Out of the Shadow opens with "Every Moment", a song that begins with channel-switching low-end tones and a metallic guitar figure that sounds as though it were run through a ring-modulator-- instrumentation that stands in stark opposition to the Brian Wilson-caliber harmonies preparing to break over the arrangement like dawn. A shifting fog traced with refracted light, this nervous jostle of pop standards (bright Byrds guitar tones, big balloony drums), set against a backdrop of alien drones, elucidates exactly why Rogue Wave are such felicitous label/tourmates for The Shins.
The crisp percussion, uproariously strummed acoustic guitar of "Nourishment Nation" recalls Yo La Tengo if pared down to the most broad and translucent gestures-- particularly when the Ira Kaplan-esque vocal melody begins snaking around the amorphous arrangement like scaffolding. "Be Kind + Remind" opens with a guitar phrase as ineluctable and hypnotic as anything Windsor for the Derby has produced, and its twittering birds lend it the same Emersonian naturalism. It's also the record's first brush with questionable lyrical choices-- the "please be kind and remind" pun of the chorus seems like forced quirkiness, and strikes a discordant aesthetic note. Despite it, the flashes of bright plumage flitting through the arrangement in the guise of tiny whistles and bells enliven the auditory canvas enough to rescue it from the clutches of ignominy.
"Kicking the Heart Out" is a spare acoustic ballad augmented by chiming harmonics. It trades the earlier songs' more inflated vocals for leaner, darker melodic turns that fully exploit Schwartz's knack for creating sonic atmospheres akin to gazing at the natural splendor of The Pacific Ocean on a calendar in a sterile office cubicle. The walking bassline takes it increasingly lower, into the murkier dungeons of consciousness. Wildly incongruous handclaps cement its pristine strangeness. This is the loudest quiet since Simon & Garfunkel turned a facile paradox into a philosophical enigma by aurally evoking "The Sound of Silence".
Considering Out of the Shadows' backstory and recording sessions, this album may come to embody the sound of Rogue Wave in an embryonic stage. With the band's new members likely to play a larger role in song development from here on out, it seems likely that the group could quickly evolve into another entity altogether. Either way, having been plucked from obscurity by Sub Pop, and showing so much potential this early on, Rogue Wave seem ordained for long-term success.
