Frankie Rose is a Brooklyn bartender best known for her drum/vocal/guitar work with fuzzed-out retro acts like Crystal Stilts, Vivian Girls, and Dum Dum Girls. As she bounced from one project to the next (in some cases before she was even considered a proper member), the distinctive threads that joined these bands-- garage-rock ethos, dour jangle pop, 60s girl-group harmonies, questionable sonic fidelity-- suggested Rose had a clearly defined musical M.O. But with her fourth project in almost as many years, Rose is taking on a different approach: She seems intent on creating a harmonically driven, high-fidelity throwback pop album-- a novel concept among the dozens of her lo-fi peers looking to similar sounds for inspiration.
While Frankie Rose and the Outs lacks some of the charge of her former projects, her restraint feels as brash and satisfying. The key is subtlety and refinement: The guitars here do none of the heavy lifting, often left to only punctuate or reinforce the cascading vocal harmonies and rolling bass that anchor these songs. "Memo"'s sharp, lightly reverbed notes are whisked away by charging drums and voices; the buzzy flat tone in the background of "That's What People Told Me" exists only to offset the song's cautious, lilting shake before shaping itself into a spy-movie riff.
At times woefully angelic (like on the sublime cover of Arthur Russell's "You Can Make Me Feel Bad") or richly layered (the soaring "Little Brown Haired Girls"), Rose's harmonies nail down the technical aspect of what made these girl groups so appealing. For a record this simple and, even at its punchiest, seductively serene, it might seem far-fetched to compliment it for being daring. But considering its own orbit-- and her eschewing lo-fi recording techniques-- Rose cuts right to the chase, making lean, elegant music that practically glows in the face of exceptional fuss.
