Frankie Rose and the Outs

iTunes Review

After drumming with The Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and occasionally The Dum Dum Girls, Frankie Rose moved to guitar and put together The Outs, an all-women outfit with a sound that complements all those bands. Multitudinous layers of reverb buoy Rose’s airy singing. Adding shimmer like a string of jewels, her vocals glow around everything from the guitars (both twangy and shoegazey) to the rumbling bass, snappy snares, and jangling tambourines. This debut showcases a number of strengths, namely the band’s ability to move gracefully from moody navel-gazing (“Hollow Life”) to navel-gazing with Phil Spector flourishes (“Save Me”), and from roaring pop hookage (“Girlfriend Island”) to volcanic garage punk (“Don’t Tread”). If The Cramps had ever hooked up with The Mamas & The Papas, it might have sounded like “Must Be Nice.” The hidden gem here may be a cover of the late composer/artist Arthur Russell’s haunting “You Can Make Me Feel Bad,” with dark scratches of guitar providing the sparest musical accompaniment.