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FRANKIE ROSE

Frankie Rose

Love As Projection

    "This album is about having to focus our collective energies on the small things around that we can control to find joy. A distraction from the larger systemic problems that feel so overwhelming and are so very out of our collective hands... for now...”

    Love As Projection is the new album by Frankie Rose, her fifth studio LP and second for Night School following the reissue of her interpretation of The Cure’s Seventeen Seconds. Frankie Rose has forged an enviable musical legacy, from playing with bands like Crystal Stilts and The Vivian Girls but on Love As Projection she takes a bold step into electronic pop production. A sumptuous recorded statement, it dances in ecstasy and broods on the tumult of the western world’s decay in equal proportion. At the heart of the album is glowing, confident songwriting, resplendent in hooks and choruses but still touched with an optimism undimmed.

    After spending nearly two decades establishing herself across New York and Los Angeles independent music circles, Rose re-emerges after six years with a fresh form, aesthetic, and ethos. Celebrated over the years for her expansive approach to songwriting, lush atmospherics, and transcendent vocal melodies and harmonies, Love As Projection is a reintroduction of her established style through the lens of contemporary electronic pop. Recorded with producer Brandt Gassman and mixed with long-term collaborator Jorge Elbrecht this is the album Frankie Rose has been building up to her entire career.

    More than a rebirth, a refinement, a resurgence, Love As Projection boasts a widescreen scope: a long- form project heavily considered for half of a decade, culminating in the most personal and accessible collection of art-pop that Frankie has ever written. When Rose aims for the pop jugular as in first lead track Anything, the result is unstoppable. A majestic pop song built for radio, it erupts into an irresistible chorus that marries classic epic 80s American pop with the cult effervescence of Strawberry Switchblade “It’s like a prom scene in a John Hughes movie. It’s a hopeful song about abandoning fear even if the world is quite literally on fire.. In the end, at least we have each other,” says Rose. Sixteen Ways further boasts a propulsive, massive chorus, though tempered by a cynicism built in global post-truth, global malaise. “It’s about getting your hopes up, but simultaneously making lists in your head about how it will never work out in your favour.”

    The big anthems don’t let up there. On DOA some massive, rolling drums lathered in big mid-80s gated reverb dovetail with a syncopated baseline for the ages as Rose’s vocal sails effortlessly above. The effect isn’t unlike ethereal vocalists Clannad circa Howard’s Way or Enya jamming with Simple Minds in their stadium-conquering heyday. Rose tempers the adrenalin with heart-tugging bittersweet tones and there are plenty of them. Sleeping Night And Day takes its time with an off-the-cuff chorus, swirling around in harmony and chorus-bass. Saltwater Girl picks up the balladeering baton with another nod to album track-mode Switchblade, deep space opening up in the mid-tempo drum track and soupy, digital atmospherics. Album closer Song For A Horse, reimagines modern Pop production a-la-PC Music but shorn of the meta-atmosphere. Pianos, swelling synths, minor keys cut through with major. These moments, also seen in Feel Light offer ballast to the soaring pop choruses. Moments like these are big oceans of emotion to fall into before being led out by Rose into a bright new day.

    STAFF COMMENTS

    Barry says: Love As Projection takes all of the sheen of 80's synth pop and injects it with a modern take on songwriting and structure, with the IDIB brand of melodic, euphoric electronica clearly an influence. It's both warmly nostalgic and beautifully written, as evocative as you'd ever want.

    TRACK LISTING

    01. Sixteen Ways
    02. Anything
    03. Had It Wrong
    04. Saltwater Girl
    05. Feel Light
    06. DOA
    07. Sleeping Night And Day
    08. Molotov In Stereo
    09. Come Back
    10. Song For A Horse

    After spending years as a major presence in Brooklyn’s thriving music scene, Frankie Rose relocated to her familial home of Los Angeles for 18 months with the intention of establishing yet another moment in her storied indie rock métier. Gradually, she found herself short on sleep, funds and optimism.

    Towards the end of her time spent in Los Angeles, Frankie reached out to Jorge Elbrecht (Tamaryn, Gang Gang Dance, Violens) and began sketching what became the basic outline of what felt like a new album. Then, rather fortuitously, Frankie ended up back in Brooklyn with the realization that "in the end, I’m on my own. I have to do these things on my own." The months that ensued meant basically working with no budget and finding ways to record in-between days. This time enabled Frankie to experiment musically with a variety of people that ultimately changed the way she worked.

    The result of this existential odyssey is Cage Tropical, Frankie’s 4th album. It is awash with vintage synths, painterly effects pedals, upside down atmosphere and reverberating vocals. It evokes a new wave paranormality of sorts that drifts beyond the songs themselves. "My references aren’t just music," says Frankie, "I love old sci-fi. They Live is one of my favorite movies ever, same with Suspiria. 80’s sci-fi movies with a John Carpenter soundtrack, with silly synths – that makes it into my file, to the point that I’ll write lyrics incorporating that kind of stuff. It’s in there."

    Beginning with the shimmery, cinematic and percussive sparkling of the album’s opening track "Love in Rockets," the song’s refrain of "a wheel, a wheel of wasting my life: a wheel, a wheel of wasting my time" immediately alludes to those darker circumstances that led to the creative origins of Cage Tropical. "It’s all essentially based on what happened to me in Los Angeles and then a return to Brooklyn," says Frankie. "Misery turned into something good. The whole record to me is a redemption record and it is the most positive one I’ve made"

    "I feel like I am finally free from worrying about an outcome. I don’t care. I already lost everything. I already had the worst- case scenario. When that happens, you do become free. In the end, it’s about me rescuing myself via having this record."

    TRACK LISTING

    1. Love In Rockets
    2. Dyson Sphere
    3. Trouble
    4. Art Bell
    5. Dancing Down The Hall
    6. Cage Tropical
    7. Game To Play
    8. Red Museum
    9. Epic Slack
    10. Decontrol

    Frankie Rose

    Interstellar

      We were all knocked out by the Frankie Rose and the Outs album from 2010 but are you ready for the new Frankie Rose? – her transformation into a wholly other kind of pop, the reverie and revelation of 'Interstellar', an album that floats free of its maker’s history.
       
      So, out with the reverb of the Frankie Rose and the Outs, (and her previous bands) and in with something altogether more glittering and shivering. Interstellar is the confident swagger of a singer and auteur fully aware of how to build the simplest of pop moves into aching, full-blown melodramas, how to grab hold of an emotion and ride its darker waves.

      Highlights include "Know Me" a gorgeous piece of widescreen pop, dreamy and driving at the same time and “Night Swim” whose clean, big hooks bring to mind the best of mid-80’s pop – The Smiths, New Order -- without sacrificing any of Frankie's unique melodic style.


      STAFF COMMENTS

      Andy says: Completely different from her super debut, but in its own way just as compelling. This is shoegazey, slightly wonky, deep 'n' doomy, romantic pop.

      Frankie Rose And The Outs

      Frankie Rose And The Outs

        LP - ONE COPY ONLY!

        "Frankie Rose And The Outs" is the debut album from ex-Vivian Girl Crystal Stilt, and Dum Dum Girl Ms Frankie Rose.

        Frankie, with her former bands, has been at the forefront of a scene that mixed the sounds of lo-fi garage, big reverb-drenched Phil Spector-produced 60s girl groups, the noise aesthetic of the Jesus And Mary Chain with a touch of Velvet Underground and a strong DIY ethic to create a sound that’s influenced a new generation of bands around the world.

        On her new group’s self-titled Memphis Industries debut, Frankie Rose And The Outs have their heads in the clouds a bit more than Rose’s previous projects.

        Listening to the ghostly golden oldie grooves of songs like "Candy" and the pedal-pounding "That’s What People Told Me", it’s as if the Cocteau Twins and Shangri-Las made a split album with the help of a time machine and a freshly-acquitted Phil Spector.

        STAFF COMMENTS

        Darryl says: Riding on the current wave of cute 60s bubblegum sounds ala Best Coast comes Frankie Rose's new band. Lo-fi meets Spector-esque reverb meets JAMC's noise aesthetics, and hits now!

        Abs says: Includes a gorgeous version of Arthur Russell's "You Can Make Me Feel Bad".

        TRACK LISTING

        1. Hollow Life
        2. Candy
        3. Little Brown Haired Girls
        4. Lullabye For Roads And Miles
        5. That's What People Told Me
        6. Memo
        7. Must Be Nice
        8. Girlfriend Island
        9. You Can Make Me Feel Bad
        10. Don’t Tred
        11. Save Me


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