Arrica Rose and the …s
(pOprOck)
Warm, natural, casually excellent, the LA songwriter Arrica Rose's third full-length feels as soft and worn-in as an old tee-shirt the first time through. Let Alone Sea is the kind of record that you feel instantly familiar with, as if you'd put it on late at night all your life, whenever you needed to get back to basics or set your head straight.
Rose's dusky alto is sure and true, fluttering a little at the edges, as she sings wisely, knowingly, about sailing away or bending a recalcitrant world to one's will. There's an Americana ease to these melodies, a bit of twang and blues slipped into their clean pop contours, though all that is layered over with a dreamy bit of gauze. When Rose murmurs ruefully that "everybody will burn," in opener "Everybody," her voice is a bittersweet wisp of smoke itself, though surrounded by luminous textures of 4AD-style alt-rock in the arrangements.
Rose's band, named the Dot Dot Dots (or ....s), supports her in evocative, reticent style, putting shivery auras of guitar around lovely "Sail Away," swaggering like a New Orleans funeral band in "Summer's Gonna Burn Me (So Are You)" and cranking up the rock, Peter Gunn-style, in "We Made Out All Right." "If the World Won't Bend" is the album's highlight, but just by a hair, moving in slo-mo splendor through glowing landscapes of piano, slide guitar and ruminative regrets. Here as elsewhere on the album, Rose understates her case, allowing a slight rasp, a subtle trick of phrasing, a tiny bit of vibrato to convey the song's heartache without overselling it. Her subtlety comes in handy, too, on the closing song, which conflates the Buggles' new wave anthem, "Video Killed the Radio Star" with Louis Armstrong's tear-jerking "Wonderful World," and magically skirts sentimentality.
This is a fantastic album, instantly accessible but gaining depth and nuance every time you put it on.
DOWNLOAD: "If the World Won't Bend," "Sail Away" JENNIFER KELLY
