Maria Rose and Swiss Kicks debuts album in Flint Dec. 23

Local band, Maria Rose and the Swiss Kicks, will debut its album, New Direction, at a Flint Local 432-sponsored show Dec. 23 at the Lunch Studio, 444 S. Saginaw St. The admission is $5.

The Flint Local 432's new 8,000-square-foot home at 124 W. First St. continues to be renovated through early next year.

The show will also feature a local rock band, The Heard, and acoustic sets by Kelsey Rottiers and Cory Glover. The concert is one of a series of Flint Local 432 shows at the Lunch Studio starting on weekends in December.

Maria Rose wrote the music and lyrics for the album. She says she is happy to be breaking out of the solo singer-songwriter mold and experiment with a different sound on the seven-song album with the Swiss Kicks.

The Swiss Kicks are drummer and co-producer, Beni Schlatter, and John Patrick of Project Aleph-1 on synthesizer.

Rose and Schlatter have spent the last year recording the album mainly in Schlatter's basement studio.

"When I'm writing, I try to be as honest as possible. Beni's great, he's always saying 'try this' and providing an outside perspective," Rose said.

Schlatter is a Mott Community College and UM-Flint graduate, a substitute teacher and and in the bands, Thick as Thieves, the Steelheads, the Boomer Kids and the Beni Schlatter Trio.

Rose attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, performed for corporate events, won a 2008 Michigan pop star contest and has sung with a Vietnamese wedding band.

"We are definitely products of our environment, a post-industrial, depressed, got-to-work-with-what-you-got kind of place," Schlatter said.

"It may be financially easier to be an artist in Flint, but there are less opportunities so you need to stay motivated," said Rose.

She described the title track, New Direction, as being about staying above negativity.

The return of Fint Local 432, the downtown all-ages venue, in 2012 will give a new generation of teens a needed outlet for their own music which has been absent since the former Metropolis Building shut its doors in 2005.

Schlatter recalled being 12 or 13 years old and watching his older brother perform at Local 432, fondly remembering it as a bombed-out hole in the wall. Schlatter believes the all-ages music venue is important because it gives youth a place to listen to music in a substance-free environment. Unlike most bars, that insist performers play covers (popular favorites), Local 432, he said, has always been a place where people can write and play their own songs.

New Directions will be available at the show for $7. T-shirts will cost $15. The CD is available for download now from iTunes and Amazon.

Maria Rose and the Swiss Kicks are already collecting songs for their next CD.

They will perform in Saginaw Dec. 12 at White's Bar and Jan. 14 at the Hamilton Street Pub.

A $200,000 grant from the C. S. Mott Foundation has helped pay for the renovation of the former Genesee Indian Center Building for Flint Local 432.

The band's web site is mariarosekicks.com.