Pitchfork
January 14, 2010
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3
If Rogue Wave sound underwhelmed by the way the Great Recession has downgraded our collective prospects, consider the couple of years these Bay Area rockers have had. Two days before Christmas 2007, then-bassist Evan Farrell died in an apartment fire. Guitarist Gram LeBron lost his father. Drummer Pat Spurgeon survived a years-long quest for a new kidney, as documented in a recent PBS documentary, D Tour. And frontman Zach Rogue spent much of last year bed-ridden and partially paralyzed. Rogue Wave would've been forgiven for throwing in the towel.
Instead, they're bringing happy back. "Good Morning (The Future)", the first mp3 from the quartet's fourth album (second for Brushfire), marks a dramatic shift from the melodically tricky folk-pop that once made these guys such natural Shins labelmates. "The future isn't what it used to be/ I'm not surprised," their new song blithely begins, but its "future" unfortunately sounds like a more irritating version of the recent past. It's got the sensitive-guy choruses and peppy synth programming the Postal Service delivered to Owl City and lockstep post-punk guitars the Killers might've used to crash a Bloc Party. And, on the bridge, the sort of warped alien voices that haunted the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi. Bland political pronouncements ("Do you think that we like to take our orders from fools?") don't make this awkward electro-pop embrace any less clumsy. "Love machine"? Really?
