Zack Rogue is a cool name. With a name like that, you could be a biker, a punk, a junkie punk biker, or just about anything that sounds rough. Zack Rouge, on the other hand, isn’t nearly as cool. What does this have to do with anything? Nothing, but…

Rogue Wave is Señor Rogue’s band. And they’re currently attempting the monumental task of putting Oakland, California on the indie map. Zack Rogue and three of his road monkeys are doing it with a Seattle-meets-San Diego, explosive slack-cool that Pinback, Modest Mouse, Helio Sequence, and other Pacified acts have made a decent living on. Rogue Wave’s brand of crackhead, acoustic cloudballads are unique and powerful enough to carry it on.

The opening song, “Bird on a Wire”, opens with a rolling flow getting clawed by a sour guitar sliding down the curtains, a semi-ominous sign of the quick transitions and juxtaposition to follow. They’ve got a tendency to want to flip songs around every 8 beats or so, like excitedly flipping a pancake.

“Publish My Love” moodily stretchs sheetrock between spacepick, eventually dropping bombs whose explosions don’t last more than a few beats. It definitely keeps you on your toes. “Salesman…” and “California” are endearing acoustic tracks that valley out the album nicely as slightly-serotonic feather dusters.

The most O.C. soundtrack-friendly songs may be “Love’s Lost Guarantee” and “10:1″. “10:1″ is a shiny can of Strokes Lite that tears and rebuilds its melody, ultimately smashing it together into a clock tower assassination. “LLG” is a tapping roadbender that gives you pop in your lap like breakfast in bed before breaking into a young, cathartic saltshaker.

Rogue Wave pull off the surf-psych, blast pop that the West Coast has been breeding for most of the ’00’s now. They’ve got irreverance and class, grunge and style, grease and roses. They’re from Oakland, but it might as well be Portland.