Rose Elinor Dougall - Stellular

Drowned In Sound 80

The title of Rose Elinor Dougall’s second album is, like much of the record, perfectly selected. Stellular is exactly that: its own tiny galaxy of shining, star-bright jewels, each in its own way, quite, quite immaculate. Dougal and producer Oli ‘Boxed In’ Bayston have created a record in which everything is perfectly in its place, which knows that a little goes a long way, and a great chorus goes to the end of the earth; and while words like 'stylish' and 'tasteful' certainly suit the album’s production, they neglect the shimmering elegance with which the songs glows.

Dougall herself knows good pop music. At 19 she joined The Pipettes, an attempt to create the perfect pop group which succeeded in every sense except the 'popular' part: the project never met its commercial potential. Where the band did succeed was in creating a sharp, danceable and very British take on Sixties girl groups. The choruses shone, but there was always wit amid the sweetness in songs like ‘Judy’ and ‘ABC’. Dougall (then known as 'Rosie') was often the source. Leaving the Pipettes (an act from which they never recovered) her solo career immediately confirmed her knack for setting bittersweet observation to a hummable tune. A well received debut record was followed by an invitation to front Mark Ronson’s band on tour, a jaunt around the world which lasted over two years. Ronson, too, is someone who understands the fundamentals of sculpting great pop. It’s a hell of an education.

And it’s been put to good use. Stellular is very much the fulfillment of Dougall’s potential as a songwriter. The hooks are velcro-catchy, and she has a knack both musically and lyrically of saying a lot with very little. The whole thing is a lesson in songwriting economy, every note placed just so. The pallette of sounds here is deceptively limited, which is probably its greatest strength: chiming guitar, a fidgety, funky bass and stings of rippling, twinkling synths which tie everything together under Dougall’s cut-glass, underplayed vocal. Think Blondie at their most sophisticated. Opening track ‘Colour of Water’ sets the tone perfectly, settling into a hypnotic groove, sliced apart by a sharp vocal. There’s a circular sense of a song that could conceivably continue its pattern for hours without you minding a bit.

The formula is best represented on the title track, a twitchy indiepop bounce that layers and builds to pop glory, while Dougal lays a contrastingly laid-back vocal, accented by sparkling keyboards. It’s marvellous.

It’s a record that rarely puts a foot wrong, from the twitchy post-punk disco of ‘Closer To Me’, to the Morodo-ish actual disco of ‘All At Once’ in which Dougall does her best ice-cold Debbie Harry, which of course is sexy as all hell. The first half of the record (which we’ll stubbornly still call side one) is an absolute masterclass in pop economy. The record’s second half expands the palette, which means it loses some of that shimmery perfection, but is admirable in the way it fits the formula around genres: ‘Answer Me’s melancholic power ballad, the spacey sadness of ‘Poison Ivy’ (“Another torch song for a lost love that never belonged to me”), a powerpop duet on ‘Dive’, and a space-hymn to close the record with ‘Wanderer’. Dougall’s voice, which is always sounds faintly sad (all the best voices do) laying a melancholic consistency across the whole thing. Star-shaped indeed.

Pitchfork 72

The Pipettes as a group were never bound to last—a decade on, it doesn’t sound so appealing to combine the girl-group fandom of indie rock with the schtick of Meghan Trainor and the singer-retention of the Sugababes. The Pipettes as a group of artists, though, have been remarkably prolific. Two years ago, Gwenno Saunders released the year’s highest-concept album, the Welsh-language, sci-fi-enamored Y Dydd Olaf. Bandmate Rose Elinor Dougall, meanwhile has quietly released several albums and EPs’ worth of lovelorn pop music. The comparison is inevitable—both artists work in more or less the same vein of synthpop—but where Gwenno prefers futurism, Dougall prefers romanticism. On tracks like “Fallen Over” and “Hanging Around,” she sheds the self-consciousness and polka-dotted prurience of her old group for a disarmingly earnest swoon.

Stellular, produced with Oli Bayston of Boxed In (who also sings on and co-wrote “Dive”) is not a departure from her past solo work—if you’ve heard any of the EPs, you know what to expect, and even if you haven’t, you can venture a guess. Dougall is a Pipettes alum; pastiche is expected. Specifically, most of Stellular wouldn’t exist without the past several decades of post-punk (in particular, Blondie), and the rest of it wouldn’t exist without Trish Keenan and Sarah Cracknell. The lilting “Take Yourself With You” recalls ’70s folk, spacey Stereolab, and some of ABBA’s pastoral, statelier tracks. As influences, they’re ideal—they don’t lend themselves to kitsch so much as sturdy, comfortable arrangements that Dougall inhabits with love and familiarity.

Take the title track: it begins bramble-spiky, but Dougall makes it entrancing. She winds through verbosities like “Hopes and despairs in parallel live wildly side by side” effortlessly, almost distracted. It’s a love song, but a hesitant one, caught between prickly guitars and moony sentiments, warning itself off in the bridge: “You’re giving yourself away again.” The title, as precisely chosen as the rest, compares her would-be partner to a small star; full-on cosmic crushing is just not something the narrator allows herself. She does allow herself the more earthy kind on “Closer”: closing time in some arbitrary bar, gazing at someone who’d rather blather on about something so much less important than moving their hand that last crucial centimeter. Dougall’s a wry songwriter when she wants to be, and she delivers these details to match, but the way her coy chorus and frosty “I don't care about your band—it’s 3:45 a.m.” melt within seconds reveals her hopes, and the speeding-heartbeat guitar lick, her blissful impatience. The other blatant new wave cut, “All at Once,” pulls the same sleight-of-heart. There’s as much “Rapture” in it as actual rapture; the funk and whispers and “tonight”s affect cool and do it quite well, but the lyrics—“Give me apathy...sentence me to heaven”—merely aspires toward it, from a longing place.

Indeed, what elevates Stellular from just another decade’s nostalgia exercise is that longing. “Answer Me,” while the weakest track here—Dougall’s posh voice doesn't navigate soft-rock or R&B ballads well—redeems itself in its final minute, a plush pile of backing vocals; “Space to Be” is nothing but redemption. It’s a sequel to “Stellular”—the chorus melody is tucked into the synths—set in the same city with the same loneliness, but none of the hesitation. The chorus might lend itself to a girl-group arrangement, and certainly the sentiment would: “I want a love to lift me up high, to wreak havoc on this heart of mine, tear me limb from limb until I find some kind of space to be.” But where the Pipettes would give it irony or sex somewhere, and just about every other girl-group revivalist would lean into the darkness and violence, Dougall leaves it at full-throated emotion.

The Guardian 60

(Vermilion Records)

“Everything tonight, everything tomorrow, everything at once,” whispers Rose Elinor Dougall on All at Once, a shadowy sister to Blondie’s Rapture. Hedonism, and the recklessness of being a twentysomething struggling in London, shape the second solo album from the former Pipette. The moody propulsion of the city’s krautrock scene – the Horrors, Toy (frontman Tom is her brother) – offer relief from the oppressive, gothic mood: here is a place filled with “devils and the demons” and “corpses lying side by side”. And there are stabs of jarring, self-aware artpop, the sort that came out of the city in the mid noughties (on Closer, a song about clinching a lover before closing time, she sings “I don’t care about your band, it’s 3.45am”). Her mystery and malady are communicated best on dreampop tracks Hell and Back and Colour of Water; moments of spaced-out, doomed romance on an album that’s otherwise a little too long and indulgent.