Rocket: 'R is for Rocket' Album Review

Rocket Sticks the Landing On R is for Rocket

A is for Apple, R is for Rocket, et cetera; the stuff we learn in kindergarten can guide our lives far into adulthood’s scary unknowns. And as it happens, kindergarten is where Alithea Tuttle and Cooper Ladomade—half of the Los Angeles band Rocket—learned that they liked the cut of each other’s jibs and became fast friends. It probably took a few years before they graduated from pat-a-cake to bands like my bloody valentine, Ride, and Fugazi, but here was the foundation of their future band, unwittingly established over juice boxes and fruit roll-ups.

The title of their debut, R is for Rocket, feels like it could be a subtle nod to those roots, an endorsement of the “you spend your whole life writing your debut album” aphorism—even though it’s actually a reference to the song by nineties post-hardcore outfit Radio Flyer (itself an homage to Ray Bradbury’s 1962 sci-fi short). Similarly, while the band is not named after track five on the Smashing Pumpkins’ 1992 album Siamese Dream—a common misconception—their happy-argument guitar layers are Corgan-sympathetic and sound ready to tear through the atmosphere a la “Rocket”’s B-movie ode to adolescent liberation.

The band behind the fuzz are ready to rise, too: they’ve already warmed stages in the UK for their pumpkin-smashing forbears and signed to taste-making label Transgressive, all before the release of their debut album. Relatively speaking, it’s taken Rocket a hot minute to deliver R is for Rocket. After all, it was in high school that Tuttle and Ladomade added Baron Rinzler and Desi Scaglione to their in-crowd to become a quartet. (Tuttle and Scaglione have been dating since this time, too.) As of 2021, the four had officially become Rocket the band. And now, in their twenties, it seems the band is mastering the art of growing together with patience.

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All this to say: R is for Rocket is a fantastically confident and truly complete debut. It’s not perfect, but there’s nothing missing either. We’ve had bands in this genre space start hesitant and bedroom-y before tip-toeing into bolder self-actualization, like Snail Mail or Momma or Cryogeyser—and maybe some of that endearingly DIY uncertainty would have been nice to see from Rocket. But if they ever reckoned with that awkward growing stage, it was never publicized. Instead, to make their debut album, they strutted into not one but two of rock music’s sought-after studios: 64 Sound and the Foo Fighters’ Studio 606, utilizing the latter’s thunderstorm drum sound and the former’s storehouse of vintage gear. But rather than call in John Congleton or Chris Walla—or any of the go-to producers behind the big indie-rock statement albums of the last decade—to shepherd this process, Scaglione opted to wrangle the consoles.

He made R is for Rocket sound big. His and Rinzler’s guitars whip up a hurricane, leaving only Tuttle’s bass to cling to. Their big pedalboard and bigger amps wail to the high heavens, reaching their extremes on “Wide Awake,” a track that’s less about the notes they’re playing than the mad-scientist way they go all Lee and Thurston with it. Tuttle, for her part, has a soft, introverted vocal style informed by her historical shyness around singing (as she admitted to Paste, she couldn’t bring herself to sing for the first six months of band practices, only overcoming her fear at Rocket’s first-ever show)—but it’s somehow always right up front too, the element you’re transfixed on regardless of whatever else is happening. Her phrasing and timbre is just that compelling; like her bass playing, it’s reliable and easy to follow amid the cacophony.

But what lifts R is for Rocket into league with the great indie rock/shoegaze/punk pop hybrid debuts of the last decade, like Guppy and Triple Seven? It isn’t merely the record’s range, though it does have that going for it: the band can do a six-and-a-half-minute meandering epic of guitar acrobatics (see the title track, a jam they say is played a little differently every time) just as easily as they can bring things down to a twisty, Mazzy Star waltz (in “Number One Fan,” which feels like a dizzy slow dance in a sepia memory, with acoustic guitar and romantic, gushing chord changes).

What Rocket does best is song structure, songcraft. It sounds obvious, but it’s something that can get sidelined in this genre amid effects and textures or lyric-first approaches (all valid, to be sure). Take the all-important, underrated, and underutilized pre-chorus—the only thing more important than the chorus, if you ask Rocket. This band fucks with a pre-chorus; their typically reserved verses (a la the Pixies’ loud-quiet-loud style) simmer tension to the perfect level before they bust open the sky. They’re far from the first band to master this form, but the magic is in that journey towards the euphoric lift, which manages to feel as fresh and exciting on the seventh listen as it did the first. “Another Second Chance” is the best example, though several tracks do it. “I don’t think it works this way / And I just wanna hear you say,” Tuttle urges, sounding as if she’s bracing, the guitars drooling like chained-up sled dogs pulling towards dinner, then everyone hurls themselves into the chorus as one. It gives you goosebumps.

They near-enough nail every other pop song building block as well. While there are a few tracks that feel more like filler than others, such as the diss track “Pretending” and pass-you-by “Crazy,” there’s always an element that stands out. The harmonies that elevate the second verse of “One Million” sound like falling in love. The bridge of “Crossing Fingers” is a paranoid call-and-response mud fight, the guitars bristling with a warm tone à la Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and Colour and the Shape, the bass thick and chewy. And the outro to “Wide Awake” is drummer Ladomade’s moment to go full Jimmy Chamberlin beast mode.

The album structure is equally spot-on. Opener “The Choice” is rhythmically broken up and dreamy. It’s not a mean track, but it doesn’t allow you to get your footing, either. That’s why the placement of “Act Like Your Title”—the album’s shortest, most sugar-rush moment—in the track-two position is an inspired move. It has that grounded, serene “don’t fuck with me” vibe that the Pumpkins’ D’arcy Wretzky personified. It’s endlessly catchy, and the lyrics ostensibly jab at the farcical man-babies at the helm of New America. Tuttle urges her recipient to act like their title and release the denial. Lines elsewhere, like during “Crossing Fingers” and its anxiety around running out of time, could be interpreted in this same context.

Many of Tuttle’s lyrics are loose enough to be co-opted by the listener in this way, which could be seen as a shortfall of the album, though it leaves room for her writing to venture into more experimental territory in the future. She’s confirmed her primary inspiration is relationships—with herself, with ride-or-die friends, with flawed romantic partners still haunting her. And that’s because relationships kind of are everything—the foundation of her band, a reason to write. As we try to scrap together meaningful lives in an increasingly unkind world, relationships with other humans are the only thing worthy of attaching to music that can blast us out of here. Rocket knows that better than anyone.

Hayden Merrick is a London-based music journalist and Features Editor at The Line of Best Fit.

Rocket Sticks the Landing On R is for Rocket

With its bold twists and tones but grounded themes and songcraft, the LA band’s debut is in league with other fully realized guitar-hero debuts, like Guppy and Triple Seven.