FRANKIE ROSE - Cage Tropical

The era of “Interstellar” and the dream-pop revival is long gone, but Frankie Rose couldn't care less. Picking up the thread of that luminous, futuristic sound that had driven much of the success of her debut solo album, four years on from the not-particularly-successful “Herein Wild“, the most famous drummer of the US garage scene picks up again with “Cage Tropical”, her third full-length, right where she'd left off, as if the time elapsed hadn't actually brought any significant changes to the artistic life of the Brooklyn-based musician. There's barely a trace left of her indie-pop stint with Beverly, later abandoned to pursue her solo ambitions: across the ten tracks of her latest effort, the starting point is once again that lucid-dream pop, dotted with dense synth textures and tight rhythmic structures, onto which the artist this time grafts a few notable variations on a theme that risked becoming overused. While it's true that the melodic dimension doesn't quite reach the fullness of ideas of her debut, the pop-wave influences woven into the songwriting, combined with an even more spirited rhythmic drive, allow Rose to get back on track and find fresh energy for a style that risked remaining frozen at its first fine showing. There's always time to match those results and, why not, surpass them: shaking off the stasis was, at any rate, the absolute priority at this point.

Indeed, the refinement in the songwriting compared to the slapdash nature of the previous record is evident: even when the urge to break away from the pavement of her pressing debut album doesn't lead to convincing results, the desire to diversify her modules and possibilities translates into a more nuanced, richer palette, in which Rose expresses herself with greater freedom and a more widespread expressive subtlety. And although titles can sometimes be misleading, “Cage Tropical” doesn't seem so out of place in shedding a bit of light on the record's content. No, thankfully there's no overindulgence in tedious tropical-house clichés, but a certain kind of relaxedness with exotic undertones does manage to peek through amid the synths and tight rhythms that have by now become an expressive trademark of the musician, who shapes these tracks around a more expansive mood, albeit one that's in part also less dreamlike than in the recent past.

“Dancing Down The Hall”, with its more scattered instrumental contributions and a wave-touched drum part that marks its rhythm with indolence, acts as the vehicle for this new shift in perspective, building a wavering, seemingly frayed melody that nonetheless finds support in its recursive pattern, leaving considerable room for the floating sonic setting while gaining in consistency at the same time. “Art Bell”, in its own way, serves as a prelude to the mood of the previous track, condensing into two minutes of pure pop-wave ecstasy (a flawless chorus in that respect) the sensory release the musician is after, through a decidedly more consistent flow that's nevertheless never overdone.

Even when aiming for a more pronounced dynamism (the kraut-leaning drum patterns of the “Dyson Sphere”-“Trouble” pairing), her pen doesn't quite follow that energy with much ease, feeling instead more at home on that ridge separating reality from dream, and thus favouring calmer interpretations, far from too much frenzy. The keyboards, crystalline and refined in their melodicism, therefore become a prime support for Rose's vocals. Splendid in marking the subtly black, rapid shifts of the title track (where the drum machines play with the obsessive cuts of early The The), the sole descriptive element in the surreal setting of “Epic Slack” (an interlude whose title says it all), an elegant counterpoint to the dense jangle guitar work on the fine single “Red Museum”, they provide incredible support to the musician's nuanced vocals, shifting the centre of gravity each time towards different stylistic and expressive facets of a project that has found new momentum and has once again begun (pardon the pun) to dream.

There's no need, in short, to undergo total revolutions in order to successfully reconfigure and rethink one's artistic path. Even if the songwriting doesn't always manage to carry the weight of these new stylistic touches (“Love In Rockets”, a subtle nod to the band formed by ex-members of Bauhaus, partly trips over its own feet, failing to deliver the pop cadences of its arrangement with real conviction), it's nonetheless hard not to notice the escape from that predictability which had so thoroughly undermined her second effort. It's worth having faith in Frankie Rose's ongoing career: the surprises aren't over yet.

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06/10/2017