This is where Rogue Wave, the band, really gets started. As Oakland-based singer/songwriter/arranger Zach Rogue puts it, "this record is the sound of four people's ideas colliding." Descended Like Vultures, Rogue Wave's second full-length for Sub Pop, is a velvety, darkly dichotomous album: pop vs. despair; hope vs. realism. Whereas Rogue's `04 release, Out of the Shadow, was for all intents and purposes a solo project, Descended Like Vultures finds Zach Rogue's unapologetic hooks and soaring melodies built up skyscraper-high by bandmates and mulit-instrumentalists Pat Spurgeon, Gram LeBron and Evan Farrell, who have grown close and road-seasoned thanks to a year of intensive international touring with The Shins, The Helio Sequence, TV on the Radio, and Mates of State. While the new album isn't an overtly political record, (rather, it's more humanitarian) Zach Rogue's impeccable songwriting was heavily informed by what he and his band experienced on the road. On this release, Rogue Wave leaves no stone unturned, no possibility unexplored.

Descend Like Vultures is a fabulous collection of delirious, dizzy alt-pop. At times it reaches the highest acclaim any pleasantly detuned indie-rock can achieve: comparisons to New Zealand indie-rockers from the 1980s. Of course, those bands are fairly obscure these days and this Bay Area bunch may never have heard the Great Unwashed or Tall Dwarfs before. Regardless, they all share an equal love for pure, unbridled pop music and introspective experimentation. Rogue Wave's strummy debut was weighted closer to the pop side, while the new album leans more toward noise in content and pop in context (in the clean sheen of big studio production). In particular, "10:1" marks a new direction, towards a deep immersion in heaviosity. Let's hope the inclusion of "Every Moment" on the Napoleon Dynamite soundtrack has raised the band's profile to where folks aside from kids who post to indie bulletin boards obsessively will hear this album. Vultures is darker, stranger and better than its predecessor. –Mike McGonigal