Rogers Sisters : The Invisible Deck

Having grown up around a grandfather like mine who was a professional grifter, gambler, and card shark, I was taught the invisible deck trick at the tender age of nine. When I looked into the press kit for the new album by the Rogers Sisters I was quite amused when I saw that it was also a trick that Jennifer and Laura Rogers’ father showed them as well. On their second full length The Invisible Deck the Rogers Sisters keep the dynamic of that age old trick going because the listener never knows what’s going to pop up next and will continue to be surprised by each new sonic discovery. This Rogers effort is a spellbinding array all the various elements that have made rock and roll defiant, abrasive, and groundbreaking, as the trio reaches an artistic and creative zenith .

The opener “Why Won’t You” has a semi-serrated stratagem with a tempo that gets the album revved up. The Invisible Deck contains an underlying element of hedonism to it with a raw garage rock knack that flares up at times, which leaves the listener to wonder whether or not to slam dance or shake those hips. Bassist Miyuki Furtado exclaims the extra pinch of sassy attitude on chic barnburners like “The Light,” while seven-minute epic “Your Littlest World” is kept afloat to the tone of a placid psychedelic sashay.

The Rogers Sisters possess a partially buried but noticeable pop knack with some of their giddy, albeit drilling numbers, as Jennifer goes into a fuzzy guitar mode on the shoe gazer go-go of “The Clock”, a track that sounds like a collaboration between the B-52’s and My Bloody Valentine. Play it in any restless high school and it will leave some waiting for P.J. Soles to come dancing down the hall. With tracks like “The Conversation” and “Emotion Control,” we should come back to that B-52’s talk for just a second, because it is these tracks on which Furtado sings like Fred Schneider if he were super pissed and about to clock somebody with a right hook to the jawbone.

With The Invisible Deck, each member of this trio is on a different level instrumentally, but for some reason these levels all connect perfectly like puzzle pieces, resulting in the showcasing of the Rogers Sisters’ iron clad synergy. There is still that Brooklynist component in their sound, as is the raw grit from the dirty oil-stained garages of Detroit, which the sisters presumably picked up from having grown up in the Motor City.

This band may have come off as more brash in the lyrical execution on their previous releases, but this time around the Rogers Sisters seem to delve down deeper with the emotion and energy that they express and convey. With so many bands cut from a nearly identical cloth (especially in the hipster metropolis of Brooklyn) the Rogers Sisters are an original fabric of their own, and The Invisible Deck happens to be their finest effort yet. These sisters are doing it for themselves!

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