[03.03] There's a certain type of sound captured in Rogue Wave's music that I'm having a really hard time wrapping my vocabulary around. My best effort would be to say that a lot of their songs remind me of some early to mid-'90s radio pop—Buffalo Tom, Teenage Fanclub, Gin Blossoms, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Dillon Fence, The Connells—but I don't think that really does the band justice. They certainly don't sound like a throwback to that era, yet they seem to capture a similar mood in their music and a knack for the same type of pop sensibilities. There's even a certain element to their music that reminds me of '80s stalwarts like R.E.M. and later, non-punk Replacements, but I'm afraid that pigeon-holes their sound too much. Occasionally, their rhythm section follows odd time signatures not unlike a mellower version of Thingy or Heavy Vegetable, and some of the more upbeat tracks remind me of Elliott Smith's old band Heatmiser.

The bottom line: I've been listening to this record for more than a month now, and I'm still really enjoying it. It seems like that's been harder and harder to say over the last couple of years—I hear a lot of bands I enjoy for a couple of weeks, and then I file their CD away and forget all about them. I think it's the same intangible quality that makes Rogue Wave hard to describe, that also makes them interesting to listen to. Sometimes I get the notion that the best bands are those whose influences you can't really pinpoint exactly, and this is one of them. This is a great debut, and I'll certainly be keeping my eyes open for more out of them in the future (and if you're in the Bay Area, check them out live—they play out fairly often). —Jake