The Brett Rosenberg Problem
Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out
by Mike Baldino
If you’re gonna call your second album Destroyer, you better damn well mean it. There’s nothing the world needs less than a pussyfooting pretender who rolls when he should’ve rocked, but one young man who I read about and envied long before I moved to this fair city has the abundance of heart, chops, and skill to make him a prime candidate to win next year’s Royal Rumble. Sometimes the hype is justified; dividing his time between playing guitar in The Rudds, bass in Army of Jasons, fronting his own band, and churning out high quality songs with each at an alarming rate, Brett Rosenberg is the Marc Schleicher of mod pop. The Brett Rosenberg Problem’s new album showcases the prodigiously talented 23-year-old’s direct, well-written song lyrics, fiery classic rock-inspired guitar solos, and keen ear for immediately catchy and well-structured hooks.
Rosenberg (guitar, vocals), Geoff Van Duyne (bass, backing vocals), and Jason Sloan (drums) kicked off their record release party at the Middle East last month with an honest-to-goodness power ballad before blasting through a faultless, well-paced set of supercharged pop. Sloan’s hard-hitting no-nonsense drumming lends an impressive weight both live and on record. “I’ve played with a lot of drummers, but Sloan is just perfect,” says Rosenberg. “The first thing he does is always the last thing that everyone else ends up doing. The first thing he plays when you give him a song is [imitating a four-on-the-floor drum beat] boom-bap, boom boom bap. He’s sort of like a cross between Phil Rudd, Keith Moon, and Charlie Watts. He’s a very simple drummer and very into the song, and the first time you introduce something to him, he usually has right off the bat what he’s gonna play.” Rosenberg’s commanding stage presence belies his small stature; a student of The Figgs’ Mike Gent, Pete Townshend, Elvis Costello, and The Rolling Stones, onstage he’s a flurry of windmills and scissor kicks and time-honored rock ‘n’ roll moves.
Destroyer is a marked improvement over last year’s Pop Riot. The band’s focus and arrangements have tightened, and their sound has matured and become somewhat more original. The lyrics are clever and at times painfully confessional, particularly on songs like “Kelly Haas All Over Again,” “Another Kelly,” “Obsessed,” “Always Hanging Around,” and “I Don’t Really Wanna Fuck Things Up” (notice a theme?). “My Girlfriend’s Daughter” is a creepy standout written from the perspective of a 39-year-old man smitten with a 16-year-old: “My girlfriend says she’s getting bored with me/ But I’d rather go help Clara on her history/ ‘Cause I know she won’t forget the things I taught her/ She’s my girlfriend’s daughter.” I thought the progression led to their signing with Hi-Fi Records, but as Rosenberg explains, “The Hi-Fi thing doesn’t really mean anything. Hi-Fi is a record store over in JP run by Deb Klein. It’s something to be on our record that looks good for our press kits. It’s all about smoke and mirrors! [laughs]”
Rosenberg dropped out of college and moved to Boston not long ago. “It’s like the Midwest there,” he says of his upstate New York upbringing. “I wasn’t terribly unhappy. I’d been unhappy for a little while in school, but a little bit of contentment made me realize that I didn’t need to be there. I wanted to move to a city. So I withdrew from school. It was kind of a freakout. I think [moving to Boston] was good ’cause it taught me how to be independent. I was in a state school in kind of an easy program where everything was pretty much done for me, and for a workaholic that’s a very bad situation to be in if you actually want to accomplish anything.
“I was a folk singer. I’d go to open mics all around Saratoga and whatnot and pass myself off as a folk act, but the songs I was writing were rock songs; they were just given this inappropriate folk-y thing.” Elliott Smith was a big influence at the time: “Certainly when I left school, I was playing that album XO constantly. I can’t play it now. I still associate that time [in my life] with it. You know how you listen to an album a lot and you get a feeling that’s between a taste and a smell when you come back to it? I didn’t have the album when I came to Boston; I just kept hearing the songs in my head. I didn’t really know anyone very well when I came to Boston or where to live or what to do, and it was great. It was this wonderful feeling of you know when you move to a place for the first time it feels bigger? Like you can do anything. I found Geoff pretty quickly – within three days I located his apartment. We didn’t know each other that well before, but we bonded fast and had been writing letters back and forth ’cause we’re both songwriters who wanted to start a band. And we did start a band together, with both of us playing guitar and writing. It was called Forget That Girl, which became Army of Jasons the minute I left. It was both of us pulling out our best songs and trying to make the best pop that we possibly could. I think if it had worked it would’ve been kinda like The Pills, but it was just this lame-ass attitude I had about playing parts and being very focused on being really way too much of a purist back then. But I need a band. Someone said to me, ‘Well, Sloan wants to play your songs, and Geoff seems to like your songs ’ and for some reason that works, but the other doesn’t [laughs]. And it’s cool. [If Army of Jasons was led by both Brett and Geoff] it’d just be this lame-ass Boston group. We appeared way too late in each other’s lives for us to work together like that. Army of Jasons is an interesting thing alone and my trip is an interesting thing alone, and to throw it together we’d just sound kind of generic. We have too many songs-as it is, we put out one-and-a-half albums a year-it’d be like putting out The White Album every year. With The Rudds I play lead guitar and contribute parts. I think John is kind of unstructured; he’s a noise player, and I’m more traditional.”
Rosenberg would like to tackle the all-ages scene to expand his audience. “I think kids would like it. I think kids have a lot of different shit in their collections. The kids who go to Piebald, they probably have some Metallica, they probably have some Bob Marley. They’re not stupid. No one listens to just emo, no matter what your T-shirt says. I think we give audiences a little more credit. People like to know there’s a pulse, that there’s like a thing going on in the band that’s onstage, ’cause if you do all one thing, it rocks, you know, and it’s kind of like you blew the other bands off the stage. But at the same time, the audience is like, “Eh, it’s a band. I just saw another punk rock band.” But if you do a couple of different things, their friends will ask, “What was that band like the other night?” And they’ll be like, “Well, they did a couple of different things-they did these songs that rock but they had this power ballad, too ” There’s more depth. I don’t think bands give their audiences enough credit. I don’t know if indie is to blame for that there’s something that came out in punk rock like [the exclusionary concept of] “our people” is enslaving bands to the market and is turning them into moneymaking machines, ’cause everyone has to break even. Like when I came here I was kind of sad and felt this pressure to do something, and to think about why you’re doing it before you go out and do it good bands work for a year trying to make a record for a small label that will never do anything for them.”
Eerily focused in speech and performance, prodigiously talented as both a guitarist and lyricist, and with more drive, experience and wisdom than most folks twice his age, Brett Rosenberg is one of the brightest-burning highlights in the Boston music scene. Be sure to catch the band July 28 at the Kendall Café.
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