The Roosevelt: Press

Short but solid effort. Very melodic and accessible. Song writing is catchy, but catchy good.

Let’s get the meaning of the name out of the way first. The Roosevelt isn’t some sort tribute to FDR, Teddy or even Eleanor. And no, the band mates aren’t all brothers.

The Roosevelt is the name of a building in Washington, DC, that just happened to be in the background during the band’s first photo shoot.

They loved it immediately.

“We’d throw stuff out there, and nobody liked what others came up with,” said guitarist Sam Mitchell, talking over beers at the Mount Pleasant dive, The Raven, one of the band’s favorite hangouts. “[The Roosevelt] was simple. Wasn’t overly thought out. I like it.”

The Roosevelt is one of those up-and-coming bands in the DC area, featuring addicting hooks, crafty lyrics and fun, well-created indie-pop sensibility.

“That’s like the most impossible question,” said Jon Mosher, when asked how to describe the band’s sound. “Indie-pop is fine. There are other bands whose sound we like. We like to listen to music. That’s a ‘What do you guys sound like, add two bands together’ question. It doesn’t necessarily work that way. It’s a feel. On a certain day I like Wilco. On another day, it’s Broken Social Scene.”

Mosher is the group’s primary songwriter. While what he comes up with ultimately becomes a collaborative effort, Mosher is always busy at work, creating and reworking tunes.

“I get these crazy, crazy dreams,” he said. “A lot are sketch comedy, a lot are just cool imagery. When I write, a lot of it is just me fucking around on the instrument I have at the time. What the song is about is a very abstract thing."

“It’s never ever the exact same thing I put down the first time,” Mosher continued. “That way it’s collaborative, though I start the process.”

“Writing a song is among the most challenging and the most fun things to do,” he concluded.

The Roosevelt formed in early 2006 and began to hit its stride in 2007, playing in the Six Points Music Festival, rocking frequent nights at venues such as DC9 and releasing an EP over the summer.

However, that momentum came to a screeching halt when drummer Chris Carney injured his shoulder rock climbing and required surgery.

“It was disappointing to the extent we all like playing together,” said bassist Scott Remley. “We like practicing and playing together and it was disappointing not to be able to do that.”

However, the idea of continuing without Carney never seriously was considered.

“There are certain drummers you think alike with,” Remley said. “Chris and I think alike. It works really well.”

With the forced hiatus, the band was able to focus more on songwriting.

“We’ve tried to redirect that (time),” Mosher said. “We stopped and took all the old songs and started from scratch. It’s been a great process, but slow.”

The result, hopefully, will be a debut full-length album out sometime in 2008.

“I don’t know about soon, but we have the vision laid out,” Mosher said. “We pretty much know it’s 10 to 13 songs long. We like it. We really, really like these songs. If it’s not out in 2008, I’ll be crushed.”

In the meantime, The Roosevelt is planning some live shows for the first time in months. January appears to be the start of something new for the band, reclamation of the momentum they had garnered in 2007.

“We’re all ready to play a show,” Remley said. “I think January is going to be the point we start putting shows together. Chris is at the point now where he feels confident enough with his shoulder to play for 60 minutes straight. It’s our opportunity to go back out and play shows again.”

Impressed with this short but solid effort by fast up-and-coming locals The Roosevelt. Five tracks here, all worthy, melodic and accessible. The musicianship of this foursome is tight. All songs are written by Jon Mosher, and "Codeine Cure" is a highlight, the most radio-friendly of this radio-friendly bunch. Catchy is a word that has been used in describing The Roosevelt. Catchy is good. These are songs you actually won't mind to have swimming around in your head.

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STANDOUT TRACK: No. 2, “Elliott,” a strummy tribute to Elliott Smith that echoes the late singer-songwriter’s sense of melancholy, if not his intricate fingerpicking. Vocalist and guitarist Jon Mosher mourns Smith’s self-destructiveness, singing, “Elliott, you’re hanging on to things I can’t understand/Elliott, you’re fading out.”

MUSICAL MOTIVATION: In October 2005, Mosher drove eight hours to his sister's wedding. Listening to Smith's music on the way the 26-year-old Stanton Park resident wasn’t in a celebratory mood by the time he got to the Berkshires. He wondered why brilliant musicians are often so fucked up. Would I be able to write better songs, would I be able to have more interesting things to say, if I were as troubled as Elliott Smith? Mosher asked himself. Unable to sleep, he sat on a motel balcony and imagined an alter ego who’d live the bad times for him. That character, who fails to chat up an attractive woman and then passes out on the barroom floor, inhabits the song’s verses.

TRIBUTE BAND: While Mosher’s doppelgänger crashes and burns, his real life has had a happier trajectory. After the wedding, he wrote two guitar parts and taught one to his friend, Sam Mitchell. The two of them played “Elliott” at the now-defunct Staccato club last winter, impressing bassist Scott Remley, who asked to join the band. Now a quartet with drummer Chris Carney, the Roosevelt has toured the East Coast (and plays DC9 on Wednesday, Feb. 28). “This is why we are a band, this song,” says Mosher. “And it’s probably still among our favorite songs to play.”

Delivering a southern dipped sound with vocals suitable for introspective, dry humored folks, The Roosevelt present a slight enough divergence from the likes of Wilco to attract the eccentric. EP, and specifically "Codeine Cure", even offers a bit of the Luna sound, which is promising for those of us who considered Luna's passing one of the musical tragedies of 2006.

Folks, here's your chance to see and hear everything that's right about the DC music scene right now... The stuff on their EP shows how fast these guys are taking off.

The Roosevelt is a pretty straight forward band. The easiest way to put it, is that you have four guys playing solid rock songs that have memorable hooks. Their music will be stuck in your head for days and that is exactly how they want it.

One of the more enjoyable CDs to find its way into the office lately -- local or otherwise -- is the self-titled debut EP from D.C.'s the Roosevelt. It's refreshingly straightforward, winning us over with catchy, memorable songs, forgoing the overstylized sounds that many young bands seem to be employing. It's classic American pop/rock -- Wilco before getting weird, Elliott Smith in those rare moments when his pop acumen overshadowed his misery. This just goes to show that good songs remain the most reliable gimmick around.

"[The Roosevelt] is really a band without a gimmick. They don't have any flashy playing. They're not dressed in crazy clothes. It's just four guys up there depending on the oldest gimmick of all, which is just solid songs with good hooks, good vocal melodies, good lyrics, and it was just kind of refreshing to see people focus on song-craft. It reminds me of Neil Young, maybe a little Wilco. Kind of Americana-tinged folky poppy stuff."

The Roosevelt's debut EP is a bit like the FDR Memorial: A lot of people out there will say, "There's a Roosevelt memorial?" while others will keep trying to persuade their friends and family to check it out. The comparisons pretty much end there. Our 32nd president led the country through the Great Depression and most of World War II. The Roosevelt are just trying to make a name for themselves in the D.C. music scene. Their self-titled debut should help move things along.

The band – Jon Mosher on guitar/vocals, Sam Mitchell on guitar, Scott Remley on bass and Chris Carney on drums – have put together a solid collection of songs with impressive production values. Opener “Coney Island” slowly builds expectation, especially through Mosher’s lyrics. It’s not the kind of song that immediately pops, but well-crafted lines about “fireworks making movies in the sky” and a strong chorus grow on you. Songs like “Codeine Cure” and “Start It Over” are faster to catch on, especially with the nice sing-along chorus in “Codeine Cure” that buries itself deep into your brain and doesn’t let go. “Mary” slows things down a bit to show off some smooth drum and guitar work. But it’s with “Elliot” that the band really shows its potential.

During DCist’s Three Stars (***) discussion with the band, I compared “Elliot” to the Radiohead b-side “Permanent Daylight.” Mosher, being a fan of the band, mentioned that he tries to steer clear of writing songs with a Radiohead-like quality, and “Elliot” definitely isn’t a rehash of “Permanent Daylight.” But the band managed to capture the frantic nature found in that song and make it their own, especially when Mosher croons “sing like you used to for me again” and the band speeds things up.

The Roosevelt, whether they intend to or not, wear their influences on their sleeve. Album closer “Start It Over” is very reminiscent of Pavement or Stephen Malkmus’ solo material, with its rambling guitar lines and Mosher dropping the f-bomb and lines like “you’re too far to throw, you’re too light to leave it all behind” as casually as Malkmus would sing “show me a word that rhymes with pavement and I won't kill your parents and roast them on a spit.” Sounding too much like your influences can bury a band into a niche category, but The Roosevelt never come across that way. Instead, they give the impression of being both fans and musicians, which is what makes the EP so much fun.

It doesn’t matter where they say they came from or how they were formed, one thing that will immediately draw listeners to The Roosevelt is their sound. It’s surprising to hear a new band write such polished songs with memorable hooks. Maybe there is something in the water at the building in Northwest that they're named after. As of right now, the band’s discography consists of a handful of mp3s available on their site. But an EP is on the way, and the guys are ready to spread the word.

Named after an old apartment building in northeast D.C., The Roosevelt haven’t quite established themselves in the city like their namesake, but it sounds like they are ready to give it a shot.

WASHINGTON -- If you could harness the power of 100 red neckties, the energy from the squirming of a busload of over-hydrated tourists, and all the heat off the K Street asphalt during a scorching appropriations season, still, it would sound nothing like this.

And what is this?

It's the sound of crunching wicker and a guitar string breaking. And the guitar player sighing. And the audience going all, like, awww, just as that hip, new, pretty-boy band, The Roosevelt, is gearing up to play its big number.

And then suddenly, all those tortured images are appropriate to mention here, for they are what goes through a curious audience member's mind as he rests his over-sized backside against a green-velvet pool table and waits, and waits, for the show to go on.

Thankfully, the buzz is true.

There is a guardian angel watching over this hip, new, pretty-boy band.

An angelic roadie appears on the side of the stage. He offers up a sparkling white six-string. It's the kind that Jimi, and Frank, and Stevie, and all the other unlikely folks up there in the clouds play when they're just so beyond playing a stupid harp.

And with a one and a two and a three, the show goes on.

The crowd cheers. The babes in the front row stretch out their arms with their cell phone cameras and try to capture their own images in the center of this historic moment: the birth of The Next Big Thing.

The singer guy is appropriately brooding. He's trying to be like the third bowl of porridge in the story about that chick, Goldilocks. Not too hot. Not too cool. Just right.

The bass player cuts a Flansburgh-esque image. NSA be damned, he's determined to keep on rockin' in the free world. An old school craftsman, he takes great pride in his backing falsetto. You don't get this quality of workmanship in Europop. (Buy American.)

The guitar player guy stands way over there. He's closest to the bar. I'm not saying. I'm just saying. He seems to be enjoying this show as much as the audience, even if he pouts when the singer guy kicks his pals off the stage to make a solo pitch to the ladies in the crowd. (Call me. Smooch.)

And the drummer. He has so much rhythm pulsating through his extremities that he has to creep over to the edge of the stage and take his shoes off. From his head to his toes, the dude is on fire.

You know it was a kickin' first appearance at the Grog and Tankard because the jaded bar bouncer looked down from the Wizards-Sixers game at least three times to check out the show. That's really saying something, considering the guy has seen dozens of wanna-be bands come and go each week as he stamps the pre-drunks on the backs of their hands.

It's on.

No more is The Roosevelt just the name of a converted old folks home on 16th Street north of U.

No.

Now, in Washington, D.C., the name stands for rock -- no red power ties, and no squirming allowed.