FRANKIE ROSE - Interstellar

A distinguished former drummer for many of the leading acts on the American garage-rock scene (Dum Dum Girls, Crystal Stilts, and above all Vivian Girls), Frankie Rose is certainly no newcomer to music. Listening to "Interstellar", however, one gets the feeling of having stumbled onto the wrong record, as if facing some bizarre case of mistaken identity.

No need to worry, though: it really is her, raven hair and icy gaze, a Fata Morgana of our times in service to Her Majesty Music, for whom she lays out every spell in her repertoire. One does get the sense, though, that this time around she wanted to impress her lady with the finest trick she has, the one honed through hours and hours of practice and mastered down to the last detail, in a display of ambition, imagination and creativity.

And it's undeniable that Rose has tucked away plenty of surprises in her actual solo debut. Setting aside the distortion and noise of her main band, as well as the quirky tributes to 60s girl groups (collected on the record released under the name Frankie Rose And The Outs two years ago), isn't a strict requirement, but it's at least good advice to keep in mind, in order to best appreciate the real scope of the changes she's brought to her stylistic choices and sonic palette.

Struck down on the road to Damascus both by the tempting pull of synthetic pop and by the airy caresses of the most romantic dream-pop, the artist delivers a solid debut that will earn (if it isn't already) its rightful place amid the usual sea of yearly releases.

Rich in musical detail, the record draws heavily from the current dream-pop aesthetic, but reinterprets its traits with a sensibility that never smells of arid mannerism, and above all moves along coordinates entirely its own. Undoubtedly decisive here is also the musician's background: in her packed resumé, the chances to express her interest in languid, atmospheric levitation must have been few and far between. Now, though, freed from every side commitment, she can devote herself to passions nurtured for a long time, finding in them a natural destination for the evolution of her music.

There's no pandering, then, in "Interstellar", no falling back on the well-trodden path to make the record more palatable to market demands. The dense interplay of synths and guitars steers the songs away from the hyperglycemic vintage of Grimes, as well as from the domestic idylls of Beach House, winding snake-like through the dynamic flow of the tracks.

It may seem almost superfluous to point it out, but "dynamism" is a key word in the economy of this work, one of the cornerstones on which the whole structure was built. Given who we're dealing with, it would have been asking too much to expect a complete and immediate abandonment of the powerful rhythm sections she had accustomed us to until now. Yet it's remarkable how the pulse of the drum machines never clashes with the enchanted soundscapes woven by the artist — if anything, she manages to reconcile the two sides, each enhancing the other's qualities. The dancing begins with the futuristic push and pull of the title track, steeped, as expected, in cosmic references, before moving on to a more intimate synthetic vignette in the elusive "Know Me", where the vocals nearly drown in the music's insistent crackle.

Enigmatic and hazy, the songs — even when they take on a more defined structure — always play at disorienting, suggesting rather than revealing themselves, sketching out melody and composition and leaving it to the listener's intuition to complete their message. The exquisite emotional crescendo over the hammering beats of "Had We Had It" surfaces suddenly from the magnetic pulse of the verses, before spilling over into a tumultuous, angelic fanfare. Likewise, the unstoppable jangle of "Night Swim" takes countless changes of direction, despite its (perhaps overly) essential length, with her unveiling an unsuspected variety of expressive registers.

A no-man's-land caught between lost reveries and a resolute wave-oriented edge, "Interstellar", in its scant thirty-two minutes, marks the emergence of a mature style, refined down to the smallest detail, exponentially raising the stock of a musician who, with one single, decisive stroke, manages to effortlessly surpass everything released by all the bands she's been part of. It had been a long time since the much-vaunted wave of retromania had managed to deliver such a genuinely cohesive album.

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18/04/2012