Frankie Rose - Interstellar

Frankie Rose got quite a bit of impressive work experience on her CV in advance of her solo career, providing beats for riot grrl revival outfits like Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, and Crystal Stilts before making her first LP with backing band The Outs in 2010. This time around she’s completely on her own, offering up an album which plays like a syntheses of all the things critics liked about her former outfits - the directness, the girl-group harmonies, the instant choruses - but filtered through her own gauze of '80s synth-led dream pop, providing an important point of distinction from Rose’s earlier work. The distortion pedals are off, the beats are dialed down to mid tempo, and all the edges of her trademark garage rock stylings are sanded to create an atypically clean and rounded sound.

One of the biggest and most obvious advantages of this straight laced and clean-cut production is that it provides the arrangements with a welcome sense of space; allowing the quadruple-tracked harmonies enough elbow room to flourish without overcrowding the mix. Take the vocal line of early cut ‘Know Me’ which unfurls a vocal line of tightly woven triple harmony, before flowering into an even more intricately constructed chorus - an approach which would have sagged under its own weight had it employed the breakneck tempos and crunching guitars of a band like the Vivian Girls. But with glistening, trebbly guitars, a steadily driven beat and softly complimentary synths making up the arrangement, the listener isn’t distracted from the immediacy of the central melodies, nor the swift impact of the song’s pop chorus. Even at its most accomplished - such as the gorgeous four part harmony which melts seamlessly into synth lines at the close of ‘Gospel/Grace’ - Interstellar rarely sounds showy - never wanting to shatter the aura of its carefully cultivated '80s throwback identity.

The moments when Rose more bombastically blasts through the album’s typical frameworks shake the listener into an awareness of Rose’s arguably unfulfilled potential, however. The zippy, peppy ‘Night Swim’, for example, sees Rose projecting her voice with more bravado, drawing brilliant attention the effect of her harmonies, rather than downplaying them or letting them melt into the soft arrangements. And the explosive first chorus of opening title track ‘Interstellar’ sets the album off with a real sense of purpose, starkly shifting from a thin, wispy texture into a dizzying chorus of pounding drums and swelling synths. With these moments among the album’s peaks, it’s difficult not to wonder how Interstellar might’ve sounded with a bit more of a hangover from Rose’s days in the garage rock scene. But Interstellar’s sovereign identity is ultimately one of its greatest assets - an identity which Rose has created by taking the best qualities of her former bands, cleaning them off to a polished shine, adding her own blend of dreamy nostalgia, and distilling the results into the sort of satisfyingly direct pop nuggets which have become synonymous with all of Rose’s work to date.