Rocketship
A Certain Smile, a Certain Sadness

LA RECENSIONE

At the core, pronounced the Italian or the Anglo-Saxon way: we are very close to the core of Slumberland and the nineties, those of indie groups that were too far from the fuzz walls to be shoegaze and pose, perhaps not experimental enough, yet too sly and beyond everything else to land even one track in rotation and be remembered.

We know that by being all watercolors and simple sensations from ostentatious melancholy, dreamy and sugary, mainly deep and delicate, you end up with cloying sweetness and diabetic overtones. The Rocketship might have that pastel-sepia and naive air from the sixties pop, but these eight Polaroid snapshots from ninety-six have all the burnt whites like those unlikely, overabundant Stereolab organs clipping and paper moths have eaten three minutes of Carrie Cooksey leaving a suffering void of noisy demons among the memories. The guitars generally won, but here they lose, and if Kevin Shields had completely devoted himself to the organ, we would have had a Loveless of tracks like Heather, Tell Me Why, standing still in its arpeggio, held only by the wave, with nearly human keyboard choirs, m voice and f voice marrying on different octaves - classic - as in Let's Go Away, perhaps the most beautiful moment of the album, that waters down those bass and guitar arpeggios with synthetic buzzes, bittersweet, a bit emo-math.

The twee melodies between the latest Beat Happening and the Gerbils with beautiful things like Crayon Box, but never too easy, always elusive; they too may have contributed to leaving Rocketship's debut in a limbo of forgotten things, buried by plaid flannels. Rocketship have returned this year, but almost no one was there waiting for them.