Zach Rogue - vocals, guitar, wurlitzer, icy hot toothpaste
Pat Spurgeon - drums, keyboard, samples, vocals, ass slaps (left and right cheeks)
Dominic East - guitar, pedal steel, vocals, female jacket
Cameron Jasper - bass

"Now we're born again," sings Zach Rogue on the closing track of Rogue Wave's fourth studio album, Permalight. The dreamy acoustic lament lasts just over a minute but in sound and spirit it neatly sums up everything that comes before it. A punchy, deceptively effervescent set of multi-instrumental pop tunes, the Northern California band's latest set represents a giant breakthrough for Rogue and his longtime musical partner, drummer- keyboardist- vocalist Pat Spurgeon.

In September 2008, after the band returned to Oakland following a summer tour, Rogue played a solo show opening for Nada Surf. Two days later, the singer woke up and couldn't move. There was some concern that he might be having an aneurysm or heart attack, so doctors wheeled an X-ray machine into his living room to check his heart and lungs. It turns out Rogue had slipped two discs in his neck, which were pressing on his spinal cord. "It was the worst pain I had experienced," he says.

Over the next few months, his condition grew worse until he eventually lost feeling in his right hand. Confined to his bed, there was nothing doctors could do for him, no medications that could relieve his pain. "I just felt like I was being tortured," Rogue says. "I felt like I was dying." In January, the pain began to gradually lift, giving him just enough sensation to pick up the guitar and strum it. He celebrated the recovery the best way he knew, by pouring his relief into new material. "When I started writing I wanted to make a record that was a little more up, a record you could move your body to because I couldn't move for so long," Rogue says. "I told Pat I wanted to make a total dance album."

To do that Rogue decided to make a conscious break from the past. "I decided when I picked up the guitar again I didn't want to play anything I knew," he says. "Even if that meant yelling into the microphone or detuning a guitar, I wanted to record all those ideas."

guitar, wurlitzer, pedal steel, drums, keyboard, samples, bass

bushmills, short circuit (not directed by steven spielberg), haribo, day-wiches, tennis players (cuz they have fuzzy balls), countries that have siestas, capes, acorns, monophonic thriller, CHILLOWs...