Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
Welcome to the backyard alligator roast, y’all. Here’s the debut album from Gulfport, Miss.’s Rosco Bandana. Bug spray highly recommended.
The collection of songs grips tightly to a charming, small-town and undeniably Southern sensibility. Somehow it makes perfect sense that I write this review from a plane between Tallahassee, Fla. and Atlanta. That fact combined with a lingering wild honeysuckle taste in my mouth lend a well-timed understanding of what I think Rosco Bandana is up to here. It makes me resent the social intolerance of barefootedness (which I’m convinced is a word) while airborne. The band conjures a down-home flavor only occasionally bordering on annoying (see “Tender”), classically paired with secondhand cowboy boots and poorly hand-rolled cigarettes.
Although the album starts more as a ripple than a splash, Rosco only waits til the second cut to impress. Split song “Woe Is Me” riles up mad Mississippi mud, caked on thick to the handclaps and fiddle. It’s a self-gratuitous bummer-gone-party track with barn-rattling foot stomps.
Mandolin marmalade dances in “Radio Band Singer.” Female vocal harmonization glows the most bright here, so take note. Singer/songwriter Jason Sanford plainly paints the wild flower field we all suspected before, plopping new love dead center of the hanging pollen.
“Tender” kidnaps the listener on a youth group ski trip—and none of the fun “making purple” parts of one, either. Instead, the suspicious (religious?), motivational poster components (“Come on, come on / Love’s the greatest thing / Waiting for that feeling [x 1 billion, approximately]), would leave even a smoothie shop counter girl’s throat dry. It almost made me question exactly what the hell Rosco had added to Time’s agenda. But, after just four and a half minutes, it’s all a bad dream of the past and totally skippable upon future listens.
I originally felt only lukewarm about Sanford’s part-Dylan-part-Elvis Perkins-splash o’-Walkmen vocals, but during my time with Time, they intensified. Its slight twang and warble make the album’s narrator seem like a sagacious, older—also maybe cardigan’d—mockingbird. Sanford tells a good story, especially in the dark “Heartbreak Shape” and rowdy “Tangled Up.” It hardly matters that the lyrics themselves don’t hold a lot of poetry on their own. They’re simple, sure, but Sanford lights them with a branch from the bonfire, sparked first by all the raging banjo.
Essentially, Time To Begin makes this beer snob feel satiated with the idea of a hay barrel Natty Ice—hell, whatever beer, really—as long as it’s cold and from the can.
