Label. Bleepmachine
Artist. Bosco Rogers
Title. Post Exotic
Format. Digital
Cat.Number. BM003
Release Date. 08 July 2016
Distribution.
Domain. http://boscorogers.com

Souncloud: https://soundcloud.com/bosco-rogers

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BoscoRogers

Brit-pop meats French-style: The happy, weird, and a little bit crazy team Bosco Rogers managed to create a nice potpourri of old-school sounds that will surely mix up your party.

… Got this FUN album in the mailbox and thought you want to know about this duo, too: BOSCO ROGERS. Their debut album on Bleepmachine combines hippi’esque pop-tunes with psychedelic punk – an ode to the 50ies-70ies that takes you back to flower-power sunny summer days and lighthearted excursions into nature. Brit-pop meats indie-French-style: The happy, weird, and a little bit crazy team Bosco Rogers managed to create a nice potpourri of old-school sounds that will surely mix up your party!

Googoo EP with the additional track “Corner to Corner”, which was left out on the album:

 French Kiss EP with two additional tracks “Banana Socks” and “Shelter”:

Bosco Rogers’ debut album Post Exotic is a kaleidoscopic collection of flower punk and joyous psychedelia. It is surf-pop made by urban-dwelling land lubbers, garage rock dragged out into the sunlight. It is the sound of San Francisco in 1967 and Wigan Casino in 1977. It is LA’s Paisley Underground in 1987, the desert rocking Joshua Tree in 1997 and London in 2017.

Bosco Rogers formed are the duo of Barthélémy ‘Barth’ Corbelet and Delphinius ‘Del’ Vargas. This Franco-Anglo partnership was born over spilled drinks and a game of pool in Camden’s longstanding cultural flea-pit The Good Mixer after the pair found themselves signed to the same label while working on different projects several years ago. Their name comes from the French village of Bosc-Roger-sur- Buchy in Normandy, where their earliest songs were written.

Citing influences including The Monks, Suicide, The Gories, B-52s, the Bosco bro’s are unafraid to wear Hawaiian shirts and fez’s and cheap sunglasses indoors. They are the antidote to the bleached-out banalities of earnest introspection and tawdry try-hards. “Look around and now is really not the time to be wearing brightly coloured shirts with palm trees on,” admits Barth in broken English. “We’re conscious of the era we’re living in. But then perhaps now is exactly the right time to be wearing crappy clothes and doing what we do. I think the trick is to be aware of the world, but not get dragged down by the darkness that surrounds us. We prefer life.”

Dividing their time between Hastings, UK and Rouen, France, where Barth and Del both run recording studios, Bosco Rogers have crafted a debut album, Post Exotic that is the very antithesis of these uncertain and shadowed times in which we live. With its whistled, Ennio Morricone-esque hook ‘The Middle’, for example, is pure 60s psych-pop with its kaftan bells a-ringing, while ‘French Kiss’ sounds like Forever Changes-era Love let loose in a skipful of synths. It’s Arthur Lee cutting some rug, The Byrds with beats. “It’s a song about beautiful mistakes, small town love affairs, drinking too much, being a hot mess,” says Del. “It’s about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, missed opportunities and the fatalistic nature of love.”

With its twanging Hawaiian guitars, Italian keyboards, fuzz guitars, molten reverb and sun-kissed harmonies ‘Beach! Beach! Beach!’ offers transportative pop that reaches for the sun-cream (can you do my back, babes?). It is, the band say, “a dark story of kisses exchanged for free limo rides and three scoop ice-creams”, while the album’s title track struts right out of your speakers – Canned Heat morphing into a ska-flecked, old time moonstomp complete with a sax solo wailing long into the night. “We enjoy the music of the past but we’re neither purists nor particularly nostalgic,” says Del. “The aim was to create what we could using just drums, synths, a guitar.”
Anthemic new single ‘True Romance’ is a modern hymn, a state-of-the-world address that features as many of Bosco’s friends that they could cram into a room to sing along with them. It acknowledges sadness while ever succumbing to it. “The world is burning and people couldn’t care less as long as the party doesn’t stop,” explains Del. “We are not those kinds of people. ‘True Romance’ is about never losing your sense of curiosity or wonderment at the world.” In closer ‘Roses’ more synths lead the listener back to the beginning of the album, as two narrative voices – one of naivety, the other of bitter experience – offers different perspectives as the warm fuzz washes over the listener.

As the album fades away was it, we wonder, all a dream? Fun is the point of this band. “Bosco Rogers exist for pleasure and the pursuit of harmonies. We wanted to create something direct and emotional, but which isn’t over-thought,” says Barth.

With the album mixed by Claudius Mittendorfer in New York and the songwriting shared by the pair, many of Bosco Rogers’ lyrics come from that place where words and phrases get distorted or interpreted during translation. “Barth always wants me to write the lyrics because I’m the English speaker,” explains Del. “But when he translates from French to English a new, odd type of message seems to emerge.”

“There is a lot double meaning and entendre in what we do,” adds Barth. “For example, in France we have a saying ‘Jump on and you can see the Eiffel Tower’, which is a crude phrase a man might say to women, but translated into English it seems to suggest something else, something more innocent or poetic perhaps. The lyrics for ‘Buttercup’ came from a collection of strange abusive texts that Del used to receive. To this day he has no idea who it was who sent them.”

Despite outward appearance and their cheap-as-chips green screen videos Bosco Rogers should not be mistake for dilettantes or divs. Barth and Del also have colourful careers that take in all manner of musical endeavours, including production, songwriting and soundtracking films. Their conversation is peppered with all manner of wider reference points too – Barth confesses he listens to way more Erik Satie than any rock music.

Then there’s the album’s title, Post Exotic, which is a term coined by French author Antoine Volodine to describe a literary movement of work that explores post-Apocalyptic, Philip K Dick-esque worlds that are anything but exotic. (The movement, incidentally, is comprised entirely of novels written by Volodine under a variety of pseudonyms.) “His works are very dream-like and explore strange realities,” says Barth. “But there’s a B-movie aspect to it too, where there’s always some kind of sexual adventure. It’s fresh, it’s tongue-in-cheek. It’s post-exotic.”

Much like the band themselves as they playfully subvert the pop form. Two singles – Googoo EP (2014) and French Kiss EP (2015) – have pulled people into the strange Bosco Rogers sphere, where sun-drenched harmonies and droll narratives are propelled by an undeniable joie de vivre. Dancefloor destruction surely beckons, “To quote Devo, we’re ‘through being cool’,” says Del. “It’s too much effort. Be silly, have fun, dance like a fool.”

– Text by Ben Myers, April 2016, provided by E. Nehrmann