Gravity Sessions, the previous release from Chicago’s Rosetta West, was a short, sharp, and shockingly concise collection of songs, so it is only natural that this time out, the band gives itself more room to work with. More room to explore and expand their sonic potential, more room to breathe, more room to make great music unhindered by constraints of space and perhaps even existing expectation.
Their latest release, God of the Dead, is less an album and more a fetid and fervent fever dream—a sprawling, ragged tapestry of primal sounds stitched together from weird, in the archaic meaning of the word, blues-rock, jagged punky-funky grooves, acoustic honesty, ornate pianos, and feedback-drenched musical landscapeswhere it feels like the guitars are haunted and it feels as if the music is trying to exhume something malevolent from within.
It’s a wildly diverse album, unapologetically unpolished, and all the better for it. As ever, Rosetta West delves deep into themes of mysticism and spirituality, but this time the veil between the esoteric and the everyday feels thinner—blurred, distorted, maybe even broken. This is indeed an album with a foot in both the here-and-now and the unfathomable beyond.
If “I Don’t Care” echoes with the sound of long-dead, delta bluesmen, the rise and fall of the Mississippi audible in the ebb and flow of its groove, then “Chain Smoke” is a distorted eddy of swampy, voodoo blues-rock: raw and ritualistic, sounding like a sonic shamanic calling on those beyond.
“My Life” is dark and delicious, guitars spiral through stacatto sonics, feeling like an itch that can’t be scrathched, relentless and repetative, hypnotic and hungry, “Baby Come Home” shows that acoustic ballads are well within their reach and “Midnight” wraps things up by howling at the moon to the sound of spectral sonics and a guitar lines that shimmer with a ghostly, almost arabesque glow.
I liked the previous release for the way that it just got on with the job at hand, but I love “God of the Dead” because it not only takes time to explore musical lands far beyond the safety of polite musical society, but it has the decency to take us along for the raw and raucous ride.
