The Rogers Sisters

Boston Globe - Rogers Sisters Interview - 03/31/06

Anything but plain.

Rogers Sisters’ bare-bones name belies their nervy post-punk sound.

Serendipity can make a great song, a cool band, or both. Take the Rogers Sisters, a mischievously noisy trio from Brooklyn comprising two actual Rogers sisters, Jennifer (on guitar) and Laura (on drums), and Miyuki Furtado, an honorary sister even though he’s the Hawaiian guy who plays bass.

That Jennifer and Laura might bang out songs together isn’t so far-fetched. The fact that a spot-on Prince impersonation by Furtado at a Chinatown karaoke bar in New York would secure his fate in the fledgling outfit is one of those rare moments where all the stars aligned.

It all started when a mutual friend introduced the parties. ‘’He said [the sisters] liked Ike and Tina Turner records, the Zombies and Kinks, as well as albums by the Fall and the Cure, and I thought to myself, ‘Well, that’s the stuff I love,’ ” Furtado recalls during a dicey cellphone call en route to a Rogers Sisters show in Pittsburgh.

‘’They asked if I wanted to go along with them to a karaoke bar, and I said yeah, sure. At the time, they didn’t know that I sang, but I did a Prince song and I ended up on my knees, writhing around on the floor.”

Furtado was in. ‘’We played a party the next night, were really loud, and the police were called.” The birthday bash was the band’s first gig. They play the Middle East Downstairs on Monday.

The Rogers Sisters may have one of the plainer names in rock—heck, they almost sound like a drab folk act—but from the first few moments of the band’s new CD, ‘’The Invisible Deck,” what’s plain is that the trio’s sound is anything but. Ever since the band’s 2002 debut, ‘’Purely Evil,” critics have stumbled over themselves to sum up the band’s sinewy, nervy take on post-punk pop: a little Bikini Kill here, a little X-Ray Spex there, a smidgen of B-52’s. We’d also throw Le Tigre, Imperial Teen, and Sleater-Kinney into the mix.

But then, you might expect someone who names both Ike and Tina Turner and the Fall as equal influences to have eclectic tastes. ‘’The one rule we had when we started out was no ballads,” says Furtado.

‘’The Invisible Deck” is a terrific buzz of a listen, a shape shifter of moods, textures, and ideas. The disc never strays from snappy, airtight grooves and the potent punch of a welterweight (‘’You Undecided,” ‘’Money Matters,” etc. have not an ounce of fat on them). Coupled with the album’s jolts of electric guitar, the giddy vocal collisions—Furtado’s wiry jab cutting in and around Jennifer’s sweeter vocals—lend a pop-punk urgency to the material.

‘’We wanted it to be more song-oriented [than the previous discs] and have the attention centered around the guitar, and we paid a lot of attention to our vocal arrangements,” Furtado says of the recording sessions that took considerably longer than the two- and three-day blasts of energy that constituted the band’s previous recording schedules.

‘’We really wanted to sing this time around, so that was a big challenge for us. It was very exhausting but gratifying. We’re restless—we didn’t want to do another version of an older record.”

So, would Furtado have liked ‘’The Invisible Deck” had he heard it as a teenager? ‘’Oh yeah, sure,” Furtado says without a moment’s hesitation. ‘’This band rocks!”

By Jonathan Perry, Globe Correspondent

Boston Globe