Review: Frankie Rose - Interstellar

3/5

Frankie Rose has left the girls behind - she's said goodbye to the Vivian Girls and The Dum Dum Girls. She's ditched Crystal Stilts. She's dropped the backing band from her last album. Finally, Frankie Rose has released her first album as a proper solo artist and Interstellar proves that she's perfectly capable of going it alone.

Interstellar plays like the slow summer night to the raucous daytime indie of Frankie Rose’s previous bands Vivian Girls and Dum Dum Girls – if you could hear those girls’ dreams, this is probably what they’d sound like.

The album is unobtrusive – everything is muted under so many layers of reverb and synth that not even the fastest songs will make sit up and make you pay attention.

Which is a shame – there’s a lot to pay attention to. Frankie Rose knows how to build a song – there’s the barely audible bass, there’s the echoing drums and there’s those breathy, yearning vocals.

Walls of sound create a mood of 80s melancholia that drifts along in the background like a dream. And that’s the problem – this is beautiful music, but it’s background music.