In Rocketship’s first album for 13 years Dustin Reske may have been tempted to formulate something of a new template to conform to the modernity of the current era’s pretty bedroom/indie-pop. Thankfully he does not.

For this is album filled with lyrical imagery about isolation, the impersonality of society, attitudes towards those of weirder dispositions, the coping mechanisms people employ to  simply get through and the love lives of the disaffected.

As such the concept of overt fresh faced jangly indie-pop does cannot really apply and the continued usage of a perverse attitude to bedroom-pop is used as as a vehicle to express his life addled resignations and remonstrations.

With such a subject matter it is no surprise that this is an album that deconstructs any semblance of song structure and/or development and re-engineers the tracks in an order that is ‘only Rocketship‘

As such the album revels in tracks like the fuzzed out bliss-pop of bass driven entities like Under Streetlight Shadows, I Just Can’t Get Enough of You and the album’s true stand out Milk-Aisle Shadows (see below). Such tracks are the interruped hooks and background off kilter high end (hidden) jangled riffs of anti-legend.

This sense of essential weird is augmented with tracks such as Nothing Deep Inside, Outer Otherness (see below) and  I Don’t Know Why I Still Love You which are all sampled loops and organs with attitudinal dysfunction. These tracks are the sound that the Young Marble Giants would have aspired to if they had acquired access to this century and are quintessentially Rocketship.

As with every Rocketship release there are those moments where sheer beauty must shine through past the obtuse. As such the vibrance of tracks such as Broken Music Box and the jangled clarity of City Fair allow the ‘made for Sarah Records voice’ of Ellen Osborn to thrive in all it’s deliberated and shy majesty.

We can only hope it will not be another 13 years before Rocketship release another album. However, if it is, an album likes this makes you realize, that it will probably be worth the wait!

Artist Links:  rocketshipmusic.com, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, Facebook

Label Links:  nonstopco-op.com

Label Links:  darla.com, Facebook, Twitter, instagram.com, YouTube