Rosebuds set 'Furies' loose

RALEIGH -- Usually, it's parents who embarrass their offspring with incriminating old pictures or recordings. But Rosebuds, the husband-and-wife rock-band duo of Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp, are happy to turn that on its head.

"My mom would kill me if she knew I was doin' this," Howard murmurs with a conspiratorial grin. It's a weekday afternoon in the couple's Oakwood Park house, and Howard has brought out a record player to play an old 45-RPM country single by one Ray McCartney -- Howard's mother. The record was released 30-odd years ago on his uncle's label, Key Records.

Wonder of wonders, however, the record is pretty good. True, the period countrypolitan arrangement is a little corny, but it doesn't hide the fact that Howard's mother has a strong, brassy voice. Nothing at all like her son's ultra-cool indie-pop band, although she has sung with the Rosebuds before (backup vocals on their 2006 recording "Oh It's Christmas"). But you could imagine her on a bill with Loretta Lynn.

"The funny part about this record is that she spent more money on it, in the '70s, than we did on our first album," Crisp says, laughing. "We don't spend a ton of money on our records, mostly because we don't have a ton of money. It's not that we ever wanted our thing to be playing [expletive] stuff. But it eventually kind of became our thing, playing cheap old Casio keyboards."

"Yeah, button number 64 on the Casio keyboard is great," Howard says. "The one labeled 'Synth pad.' "

Button number 64 is in full effect on the Rosebuds' recently released third album, "Night of the Furies" (Merge Records), which they'll show off Saturday night at Cat's Cradle. Sonically, "Furies" is a throwback to 1980s-vintage new wave and the electronic heyday of Modern English, New Order, ABC and other Europop stars.

The new album's chilly ambience and strict-time drumbeats mark quite a change of direction for the group. Where the first two Rosebuds albums were T-shirts, blue jeans and jingle-jangle, "Furies" is more of a dress-up album with a sense of deadpan formality that can take a while to warm up to. But give it enough listens, and it hits the mark.

"When we started this record, our first thought was, 'We don't know if this is a Rosebuds record, it's so different,' " Crisp says. "But they're all different."

True enough. Howard and Crisp formed Rosebuds in Wilmington in 2001 and moved to Raleigh a year later, drafting a series of drummers (their latest is Matt McCaughan, brother of Superchunk/Portastatic's Mac McCaughan). From the start, the Rosebuds' enthusiastic charm was one of their best assets. They debuted with 2003's "The Rosebuds Make Out," 11 bright and peppy songs steeped in the giddy-to-depressed mood swings of new romance. The 2005 follow-up, "Birds Make Good Neighbors," was darker and more measured.

But that's nothing compared to "Furies," the first Rosebuds album they've produced themselves. It's almost obsessively, gothically dark, with lyrical images including blood, tombstones, bones, iron gates, rotten fruit, winter, blame, shame and cruel winds.

Cruel winds had something to do with the album's genesis. Last August, Howard and Crisp were sweating out the approach of Hurricane Ernesto and wondering if it would knock any of the tall pine trees surrounding their house through the roof. So they stayed up all night talking.

"Between the anxiety those big trees caused and our heightened awareness, we probably entered an altered state of consciousness," Crisp says. "And we started talking about the Furies, making up new stories about the old myth. It developed its own life and created this freedom where we could be much more political under the cover of this metaphor."