by LORRAINE CARPENTER

“I wanted to sing,” says Rogue Wave’s Zach Rogue. “I wanted to try this style that I was feeling out, but I didn’t intend on a specific sound ’cause I didn’t quite know what it was yet. I’m getting closer to it now.”

Whether or not he ever wraps his head around it, fans have figured out the appeal of Rogue Wave’s plaintive pop melodies and tender-hearted lyrics, their genteel acoustic riffs and shimmering rock bombast, a seductive merger of the Shins and Guided by Voices with glints of Simon & Garfunkel, early REM and Neil Young.

Their recently released sophomore album, Descended Like Vultures, features further collaboration with the rest of the line-up—Pat Spurgeon (drums, samples), Sonya Westcott (bass) and Gram Lebron (guitar, keys)—as 2003’s Out of the Shadow was essentially Rogue’s solo side project, a break from the Desoto Reds.

He describes his old band, who are still together, as a raw, melodic, hyper-rhythmic rock band that did a 180-degree stylistic shift toward piano-led pop cabaret, though he says the attraction to solo work, rather than repulsion by the new sound, was what drove him out.

“When I was finished making Out of the Shadow, I realized I didn’t wanna do both,” he says. “It was more rock ’n’ roll, and that felt like the right thing for me.”

But when faced with gigs, the novelty of solitude wore off and the solo version of the album became his calling card for potential players. In a Craig’s List ad, he named Yo La Tengo, Nirvana, the Pixies, the Kinks and the Who as favourite bands, drawing a wide range of really great musicians, oddball artisans and utter freaks out of the woodwork.

“This one [drummer] was just unpredictable,” Rogue recalls. “When I told him that we had hired Pat, he left me some threatening voice-mail messages. That guy was scary.”

In the end, however, Rogue rounded up the perfect bandmates, and together they fleshed out his songs with fuller arrangements, signed on to Sub Pop, and lived happily ever after. But Rogue’s favourite part of the story isn’t the happy ending, but the mid-tale field recording of bird chirps. He and producer Bill Racine didn’t turn to nature for the incidental sound on the song “Be Kind + Remind,” but to legendary Stevie Wonder producer Malcolm Cecil and his pet T.O.N.T.O., the world’s largest synthesizer.

“So this barn door opens and Malcolm is there wearing a white lab coat and this huge grey afro, and he’s like, ‘Hello. T.O.N.T.O is awake.’ We walk in and it’s like a late-’60s sci-fi movie, all these weird ‘bleep-bleep, blop-blop’ noises, and then I just started pushing buttons and hanging out. I mean, this thing takes up an entire barn! It’s one of the craziest things I’ve ever seen.”

With BAD FLIRT at the Green Room
on Monday, Nov. 28, 8 p.m., $12

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