Apologies for the blogging hiatus. Life tends to get busy with things like work, bills, playoff baseball, college football and important things like music blogs tend to fall by the wayside faster than school funding in a tough economy. (Wow, went dangerously close to going political there!)
Anyways, let's start off with a story! A number of years ago I had a gift card that was burning a hole in my pocket and was walking through the local record store and not finding anything that interested me. Thus, I started looking at bands I had never heard of and finally decided to buy Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot which I had heard some good things about. It was love at first spin, and now Wilco is one of my all-time favorites. Thus, I decided to periodically invest in new music from artists who I've never heard. You never know who you might discover. It doesn't always work (I gave Yo La Tengo a fighting chance, but it's just not happening for me) but every so often, I find a band like Rogue Wave.
I started with "Asleep at Heaven's Gate", their 2005 album. Interesting side note: in researching the band there is a lot of discourse and argument over what is their best work. itunes loves Asleep at Heaven's Gate and Amazon thinks its their worst record hands down. Paste Magazine hates all their stuff except for the early demos. Spin loves "Descended like Vultures" but hates everything else they've done. And Rolling Stone refuses to acknowledge that the band exists. (Their website is horrible and whoever designed it clearly never wanted anyone who visited it to be able to find anything).
After listening to "Asleep at Heaven's Gate" a few times I started to wonder: "Why don't I own all of their albums?" Rogue Wave is a perfect mix of acoustic based pop-melody and screeching guitars, ambient keyboards and driving beats. They are simultaniously capable of unplugging and playing a simple song like "California" and then turning up the volume and getting a little avant-garde with a song like "Harmonium". I made it about a week and half before I bought "Descended Like Vultures". So far, I'm starting to lean towards "Asleep at Heaven's Gate" being the better of the 2, but that might be just due to familiarity. I guess you could say they fit in the same vein as The Shins and Modest Mouse, only not nearly as weird or depressing.
The one thing that Rogue Wave does best is creating melodies that do not leave your brain. I'm sure my office-mates will tell you that they're sick of listening to me walk around humming the chorus to "Like I Needed" over and over and over again. "Ghost" is probably my favorite song at the moment (and yes the chorus is constantly stuck in my head), although it took me several listens and finally a google search to figure out the lyrics. I could not for the life of me figure out if he was saying "Cause its you I wanted" or "It's here if you want it" it's the former not the latter. Is that the ultimate credit to a song's catch-ability? When you are singing along even though you don't entirely understand what is being said?
I also like Rogue Wave because when you can understand the lyrics, they are mostly incredibly positive and upbeat. My itunes was on random the other day and seemed to be picking up only sad songs, so it's nice to inject a little sunshine into it.
Here are some tracks I think you should check out. C'mon! Try something new:
Ghost
Like I Needed
Salesman at the Day of the Parade (it's a great song with a weird name, I promise)
Harmonium
Chicago x 12
Lake Michigan
California
Bird on a Wire
