After The Rosebuds released Life Like, their fourth album for Merge Records, the marriage that inspired the band ended. Ivan and Kelly were done, and The Rosebuds—Merge’s buoyant pop-rock couple who’d youthfully named their first album The Rosebuds Make Out—were in limbo.
But Loud Planes Fly Low, The Rosebuds’ fifth and most inventive album to date, is a sad-eyed and bright new start for Kelly and Ivan, beautifully born of the struggle to define their relationship as bandmates—and more importantly, friends—outside of the context of marriage. It wasn’t easy. Written and rewritten, recorded and re-recorded in fits and starts, Loud Planes Fly Low allowed Kelly and Ivan to have the very conversations about their relationship that they’d long avoided.
Despite the hard times now behind them, for The Rosebuds, the present is what’s most remarkable: These ten tunes are not only some of The Rosebuds’ riskiest and most rewarding to date, but they also reveal a band eager to push their own limits, a couple of musicians who have come to cope with their complicated story for this blessed moment of restart. Proudly mature, genuinely reflective, Loud Planes Fly Low is the most honest Rosebuds record since Ivan and Kelly made their way out of the gates in 2003.
