THE BIG TAKEOVER
cd reviews • Winter 2011/2012
Jack Rabid
ROCKET SURGERY
The Big Takeover (Issue No.69)

Jack's Top 40 - #30 Rocket Surgery

Flying under the radar forever, for years this greater New York trio have made some of the loveliest ethereal music, but Rocket Surgery says they’re peaking. They’ve always had some of the epic grandeur of The Chameleons (“Play With Fire” here overtly nods to “Singing Rule Britannia”), the sonic majesty of Kitchens of Distinction, and the female-voiced, chamber mothership pathos of Cocteau Twins, Siouxsie’s Banshees, and Pale Saints, but their reach is expanding like the depth of their spatial production. Witness the cinematic, orchestral strings diving like dolphins under Mollie Israel’s yearning vocal on “This Road is Long,” or the Country Western twang of Duane Eddy, solo Greg Sage, and “The Game” Echo & the Bunnymen elsewhere. Lost Patrol are busting out of any anglophile-oriented, post-dreampop, guitar-effect-dominated, 4AD-ish ghetto; Rocket Surgery is sprawling, glistening music as full of bursting beauty as 11 red roses springing open—and as dazzling as their World’s Fair (Queens) at supernova-dusk sleeve. Wow.

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