Seraphina Lotkhamnga on April 24th, 2012

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Frankie Rose has come a long way since her lo-fi days in female indie-pop armies such as Vivian Girls and the Dum Dum Girls, and her time in Crystal Stilts. She’s proved her pop-songwriting chops when she fronted her band the Outs a couple of years ago, but Rose has elevated her game further yet with this year’s solo effort “Interstellar,” which cannot be described any better than tingling planetarium pop.

||| Photos by Carl Pocket

On the album, Rose’s waves of dream-pop and shoegaze provide the perfect context for her warm, reverb-draped vocals – ultimately the principal instrument on the record. That ambiance failed to translate on to stage last Thursday at the Satellite. Instead of dream-pop capable of blurring the line between fantasy and reality, Rose and her band seemed stuck on the ground, the atmospherics in her music seemingly far away in space.

Setting the starry-toned set, Rose opened with “Moon in My Mind,” a track which rumbles with dark bass lines and boasts inviting echoes. But the song quickly lost its depth a few seconds in to the song. Not only were Rose’s vocals surprisingly brighter live, but the band’s execution fell short of the rich arrangement she had written for the song.

At few other times during the set was any semblance of the album’s moody textures evident. Instead, the almost-full house at the Satellite was given an exuberant, if straight-ahead, rendering of the songs on “Interstellar,” with the frontwoman in obviously high spirits. With a cheery disposition, Rose announced “I feel like bouncing up and down!” Briefly an Angeleno before she packed up for Brooklyn, Rose seemed giddy to have a homecoming show with a new album in tow.

Songs such as “Gospel/Grace” and “Know Me” (the most straight forward indie-pop tune on the record) stoked the momentum, and Rose’s intensity with her playing fueled the fires. Her bandmates, though, appeared disconnected; they might as well have been playing on separate stages. The shoegazey tones lacked the slink, the synths seemed to have ADD when attempting to groove with the percussion and the guitars, and the bass lines seemed apathetically hollow.

If it weren’t for her acute melodies (and her strong rapport with the crowd), Rose’s show could have easily turned into mush. And then almost to save the entire set, she chose “Pair of Wings” as the encore – a  song which innocently but triumphantly refuses to be shrouded by superfluities and shines with true melody.

Brooklyn’s Dive opened with a raucous set of mostly guitar-driven instrumentals and and Melbourne’s the Twerps preceded with their easy, breezy indie-pop.