Frankie Rose and the Outs

Those familiar with Frankie Rose's previous work with Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts and (live, but not on record) The Dum Dum Girls probably think they already know exactly what her debut as a bandleader sounds like: lashings of reverb and distortion, twangy guitar lines, high-register female vocals buried deep in the mix, and an overall devotion to the twin shrines of Phil Spector and Psychocandy, right down to a song built on the "Be My Baby"/"Just Like Honey" beat. But while all of those elements are present and accounted for, they're in a delightfully surprising context. Where Best Coast's debut put those sonic elements in service to puppy-love lyrics and a surf-era Brian Wilson fixation, Frankie Rose has more of a hip bohemian edge about her: these 11 songs are cool, distant and arty, lacking the self-conscious naiveté that occasionally hampers her compatriots in this style. Several songs, most notably "Hollow Life" and "Memo," favor sheets of sound over traditional pop-song structure, as if My Bloody Valentine were going for the hushed minimalism of the third Velvet Underground album. The irony is that when Frankie and her gang go for the hooks, the effort pays off in spades: with the possible exception of Best Coast's "Boyfriend," "Candy" is just about the most perfectly realized pop song anyone has yet created in this scene. But it's songs like "That's What People Told Me," where Rose's love of vintage '60s pop tropes meets a modernist reductive edge, where this album really shines.