Descended Like Vultures

Description

Descend Like Vultures is a fabulous collection of delirious, dizzy alt-pop. At times it reaches the highest acclaim any pleasantly detuned indie-rock can achieve: comparisons to New Zealand indie-rockers from the 1980s. Of course, those bands are fairly obscure these days and this Bay Area bunch may never have heard the Great Unwashed or Tall Dwarfs before. Regardless, they all share an equal love for pure, unbridled pop music and introspective experimentation. Rogue Wave's strummy debut was weighted closer to the pop side, while the new album leans more toward noise in content and pop in context (in the clean sheen of big studio production). In particular, "10:1" marks a new direction, towards a deep immersion in heaviosity. Let's hope the inclusion of "Every Moment" on the Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack has raised the band's profile to where folks aside from kids who post to indie bulletin boards obsessively will hear this album. Vultures is darker, stranger and better than its predecessor. –Mike McGonigal