Bay Area-reared indie rock outfit Rogue Wave will reissue its first two albums, Out of the Shadow and Descended Like Vultures, in expanded editions through former label Sub Pop on March 27. New colored vinyl pressings of both projects with their original track lists are also available for pre-order.
Out of the Shadow was initially released in early 2003 on Rogue Wave’s own Responsive Records imprint and reappeared the following June on Sub Pop. The album introduced the band’s homespun, heartfelt indie sound with such songs as “Endless Shovel,” a live version of which was included on the Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack.
In its reissued form, it will include four-track demos of “Every Moment,” “Kicking the Heart Out,” “Angela” and “Do I Really Wanna Die for You,” plus a live cut of Neil Young’s “Wrecking Ball” with then-Sub Pop labelmates the Helio Sequence from New York’s Bowery Ballroom on June 15, 2005.
“There’s an innocence and openness to this album, probably because I had literally no idea what I was doing,” frontman Zach Rogue admits. “I made sketches of the songs on four-track, and by and large, the structure of the songs didn’t change too much in the studio. While it felt like the most exciting thing that ever happened to me, I didn’t exactly think it would be heard by anyone except maybe my friends and family. When it was done, I used it as a way to recruit a band on Craigslist. I wish I could remember what I wrote in that posting.”
Rogue Wave upped the ante on 2005’s Descended Like Vultures, which introduced new bassist Evan Farrell and even more expertly crafted songs such as “Publish My Love,” “Are You on My Side” and “Love’s Lost Guarantee.” Since Sub Pop requested the track list be trimmed at the time, Rogue says the new version “is as we originally intended it, with weird autoharp pieces I wrote in the studio and some of the other songs we wanted in there.” They include “Eyes” from the Just Friends soundtrack, demos for “Desperate,” “Dropout” and “When We Begin,” and an alternate version of a cover of Pixies’ “Debaser” recorded for the then-hit TV series The O.C.
“We were obsessed with the Flaming Lips and hoped we could through osmosis absorb some of that Dave Fridmann magic,” Rogue says in reference to the Lips’ longtime producer, who was then based at Tarbox Studios in upstate New York. “All we wanted to do was experiment in the studio. Some nights I slept in the live room under the piano.”
Rogue Wave signed to Jack Johnson’s Brushfire Records for 2007’s Asleep at Heaven’s Gate and has since released three additional studio albums, the most recent of which was 2016’s Delusions of Grand Fur. Farrell died in a 2007 house fire in Oakland, Ca.; LeBron was in the building at the time and survived.
Leave a comment