Rogue Valley at First Avenue
Garrett Fulton
Rogue Valley set the bar high for itself when it ushered in the first of four season-themed albums with a lavish show at the Fitzgerald Theater that featured a high school drumline and a swell of special guests. Friday night’s follow-up, the release show for The Bookseller’s House, showed a continued love of theatricality, though on a smaller scale. The members took the First Avenue stage dressed in their summer whites (a popular look for local bands headlining the Mainroom this year) and surrounded by piles of books, a well-stocked bookshelf, and an artfully placed gramophone. It wasn’t quite the elaborate stage setup that the Crater Lake show received, but then again, they needed room for both drummers.
Why did the band have two drummers? That’s a good question. For the most part, its pastoral folk didn’t need both, but The Bookseller’s House aims to rock a little harder than its predecessor, and the rumbling undercurrent of extra toms helped to do just that on songs like “Encierro” and the title track. Adding to the spectacle were a pair of backup dancers, who marched up and down stairs, flung crepe paper streamers, and did an exhausting-looking choreographed routine on mini trampolines.
None of that really added to the “summer-ness” of the show, though frontman Chris Koza offered some appropriate stage banter: “I wake up sweaty every day. ... Hey, did anyone happen to do a recording of cicadas on their phones?” For the most part he let his music carry the theme, with the sort of front-porch whistling one does in a rocking chair between sips of lemonade, and lyrics about honeybees, star-gazing, and welcoming bodies of water.
Friday night may not have been as much of a production as the show that came before it, but one thing First Ave has over the Fitzgerald is room to move. By the time the band played “Rockaway,” a song dedicated to “fans of four-hour road trips at two in the morning,” and the subsequent encore—including the title track from Koza’s 2004 solo album Exit Pesce, which gave bassist Linnea Mohn a chance to do some impressive belting—a dance party worthy of future songs about summer antics had broken out.
