Droney Rose Apple Eye
(Praxis Classics Records)
Named for a parodic 2005 web series, yacht rock is the retroactively applied catchall term for the saccharine sounds that soaked the airwaves in the late 1970s and early 1980s—performatively earnest hits by carefree, soft-rocking elites with trimmed beards, puka-shell necklaces, and Hawaiian shirts. Stuff that precocious punkers of a certain age (ahem) loathed like a trip to the dentist. But there could be no denying that, as annoying as so many of those AM-golden tunes seemed back then, they could also be addictive earworms. Ditties that were hummed under the breath when no one else was around, mulled in the mind as archetypal guilty pleasures. And in many of them lurk layers of surreptitious subversiveness and emotional complexity that bely their pastel presentations. On Apple Eye, Margaretville duo Droney Rose (Patricia and Damian Catera) peels back the maudlin macrame to expose the hidden strangeness and unwittingly unsound hearts of some of these not-so-shallow-after-all oldies.
You know the tunes: Gary Wright’s “Dream Weaver,” Michael Murphy’s “Wildfire,” Bob Welch’s “Sentimental Lady,” Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight,” and four more. With Damian on guitars, synths, electronics, and other instruments and Patricia on dreamy vocals, the two deconstruct these syrupy, sun-dappled staples, pulling and stretching them like sugary strands of cotton candy until in the end each is a skeletal, barely-there outline of the original. Unsettling and weird but somehow wistfully reassuring—and a lot of fun—Apple Eye is candy-dipped, avant-garde genius.
This article appears in December 2024.
