Sometimes a husband and wife duo is ok, but only sometimes, and not in the case of the Rosebuds, a husband and wife duo that is trying too hard to be good pop and failing.
The three members of the band Ivan Howard met in Raleigh, N.C., in May 2001.
The band’s namesake, Ivan Howard, asked his wife Kelly Crisp to join him on piano at an unexpected show. Later the couple teamed up with drummer Jonathan Bass to form the Rosebuds.
Howard decided to learn to play guitar after breaking his hand from grabbing the rim at a basketball game when he was a freshman in high school. The band’s aim was to combine a ’60s pop sound with some indie rock. The idea in itself is good, but execution is tolerable at best. They cite The Beatles and the indie stalwarts Superchunk as influences.
On their debut album, Make Out, Howard’s singing is unobjectionable at best and suggestive of a mosquito at worst. The guitar is minimal in its complexities.
Instead of sounding like ’60s pop, the band sounds more like bad alternative rock. It would be nice if Crisp’s piano was less in the background and again, less simplistic. She could be a talented pianist if she wasn’t forced to play the same chords over and over. The beats are soothing, quiet and almost tranquil, but repetitive.
“Back to Boston,” maybe the best song on the album, opens with somewhat speedy guitar playing, and in the background the electric piano plays a soothing violin type sound in the background. Here Howard’s voice blends in nicely with the guitar so it drowns him out a little more as he sings “Summer fields is where we’re going / I’m going back to Boston.”
In the song “Boys Who Love Girls” the guitar twangs somewhat quietly in the background while the drum and Howard’s voice are the force of the song. Howard wails as Bass pounds on the cymbals. Not really a great combination. He sings, “You gotta know what you feel,” for way too long.
In another song, “Drunkard’s Worst Nightmares,” the whole chorus seems to be Howard chanting “Whoa whoa whoa whoa, yeah yeah yeah yeah,” over and over. If the same two words are going to be repeated over and over, the phrase in itself shouldn’t be repeated over and over again. The guitar sounds good at the beginning but then gets to be too frustrating to listen to because it’s the same guitar line playing the whole time.
The idea of combining new sounds of today with the innovative sounds of the ’60s is a brilliant plan.
It is important, however, that the band is itself creative and not just combining innovative sounds from different eras. The Rosebuds are not that band.
