Leaving Rouge

Leaving Rouge's debut collection of songs is the product of endless, lonely rehearsal sessions in Midwestern attics, apartments, and warehouses. The group's sound is rustic and often dreary, yet there is also a vibrancy and urgency to the songs that make them hard to classify. The band has the ability to shift from moments of chilling Leonard Cohen/Nick Drake-like acoustic performances to full-blown guitar anthems with ease. They have earned comparisons to early U2, the Afghan Whigs, Red House Painters, Coldplay, Interpol, and Disintegration-era Cure; but none of those references seem quite accurate. In short, Leaving Rouge's debut CD is a rich, honest, painful, unstylized work that seeks pathos before perfection and originality before genre-specific trends. Hailing from Detroit, they are a rarity among their garage-obsessed peers.