Bess Rogers
Decisions Based On Information
Self Released
By Jose Fritz
There’s just something hot about a babe who can play ukulele. Erin McKeown plays the part: she flirts, flashes her 500-watt gleaming smile, bounces her red curls and winks but she’s as gay as the day is long, as the water is wet and as the sky is blue. She’s not into you dude. She’s checking out your girlfriend. Bess Rogers has appeared to fill the void.
Bess evades the bush snare of the Brooklyn sound and makes her own record. After Beirut it was nearly impossible to pick up an accordion without Zach Condon’s initials on the tablature. She sings the sweet and poppy sea shanties of Virginia pirates. She picks the distorted guitar solos of the Pennsylvania Dutch Polka bands. She strums the jazzy lounge ukulele of pre-WWI Hawaiian string bands. …If you catch my drift.
My one complaint is that Dave Romer at Drawing Number One took a really heavy hand to the production on the record. A few tracks seem a tad out of place: the bouncing bass, the synthesized strings, the 1 and 3 downbeat begs for the trendy DJ remix. It clashes with the rest of the record that feigns an attempt ad avoiding cuteness. “Undone” instead panders; it hints at a whorish, long-term pop star plan. Or maybe she really does yearn for the stretch hummer, the leaked sex tape, the drunken appearance at the Emmys and the short stay at Betty Ford… But I’m getting ahead of myself. Damn you Dave Romer, damn you.
The other moments of over-production aren’t as criminal. “Sunday” takes a huge chance with an over-long, all-percussion structure and wins. It takes a thick rhythmic meter reminiscent of Course of Empire and spreads a thin layer of silky vocals over it like butter on toast. The effect is chilling, so much so that the words are lost to the rare texture. It is here that her role in The Age of Rockets becomes clear. She’s an experimenter, an unapologetic genre-bender. Her reverence for music is in its retooling, rethinking, and reinventing. Now that is hot.
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