ROGUE WAVE with A.C. NEWMAN and the NEINS at Lee’s Palace, Sunday (August 8). $12. 416-532-1598. Rating: NNNNN
When you grow up with a name like Zach Rogue, you’re destined for a career as an anime superhero, a soap opera star or the leader of a rock band. Luckily, the mild-mannered leader of Oakland’s Rogue Wave chose the last option, but it took him a while to get there.
Back in the early 00s, Rogue (yes, that’s his real name) was toiling by day in the Bay Area trenches of a Web development company while moonlighting as third banana in a thunderous tribal rock outfit called Desoto Reds. Then the economy crashed, the Reds suddenly morphed into a wonky distorto-Wurlitzer attack force and Rogue lost his job and spiralled into a wee existential crisis.
It might sound like our fearless hero’s life went in the shitter, but there was a happy outcome. Rogue switched coasts, spent a winter in snow-blanketed Woodstock, NY, and wound up recording the intricately melodic tunes that became Out Of The Shadow, Rogue Wave’s lovely debut.
“I needed to isolate myself in a very clean, quiet environment in order to figure out whatever it was that was on my mind at the time,” offers a scratchy-voiced Rogue on the line from his home base in San Francisco. “I didn’t want to be around any person who was familiar to me. It allowed me to focus and rethink who I was and what I wanted to do with my life and my songwriting.”
That newfound focus resulted in a combination of the lush harmonies and sunny ethos of classic California pop with the kind of confessional claustrophobia and raw honesty you get after being cooped up in your bedroom all winter.
Rogue’s got a gift for delicately balancing sincerity and twisted tongue-in-cheekiness. With off-kilter hooks and a hushed delivery, it makes for some beautifully bittersweet songs.
“I like the duality of emotions,” he says. “Saying something totally ridiculous with sincerity – or the opposite. There are mistakes I decided to leave in the songs on the record cuz I didn’t want them to be too perfect. I wanted them to be kinda ragged, to embrace that element of humanity.”
In a feat of reverse engineering, Rogue cobbled together a band to perform his tunes live after the disc was done. It’s nothing new, of course – solo singer/songwriters recruit musicians to flesh out their sound all the time.
What’s cool about Rogue Wave is how naturally they operate as a unit. Rogue claims they “lit up like fireworks” when they met, and their vibe is so effortlessly tight that they wowed Seattle’s Sub Pop enough to get signed. The label recently re-released Out Of The Shadow, which Rogue originally dropped in a super-small run on his own Responsive Recordings label over a year ago.
More serendipitously, the live version of Rogue Wave impressed peers in high places, most notably New Pornographers brain trust Carl “A.C.” Newman, who seems to have become their, uh, indie rock pimp. Newman, who hand-picked the band to join him on his current solo tour, was so stoked after catching a show that he scrawled an unsolicited testimonial and sent it to Sub Pop.
The quote, prominently featured in their official bio, raves, “The good bands are hard to describe. When the Pixies came around, nobody knew how to describe them. What could you say? Now you just say, ‘It sounds like the Pixies.’ Rogue Wave doesn’t sound like the Pixies, but they have the quality that makes them tough to nail down. You know, a few simple fresh ingredients mixed together tastefully, like good Italian food.”
High praise from an indie scene icon. How on earth did that happen?
Rogue laughs.
“We had a show in Vancouver, and the local press compared us to an early New Pornographers. Being the guy he is, Carl figured he should check us out. It was actually a terrible show. But we ended up chatting with him after, and the next day we had lunch.
“His girlfriend lives in San Francisco, so about five months ago he was down here, came to our show, bought the record and wrote that thing right afterwards. He randomly sent it over to Sub Pop. It was so cool that he did that for no reason. It’s not even his label – he’s just that kind of a guy.
“Afterwards Carl told us, ‘You guys will be scarred for life by this quote. It’ll never go away. ‘”
