Rosetta Stone
Under The Weather
Cleopatra Records
The revival of the Rosetta Stone name – still representative of the finest goth rock of its era in this writer’s opinion – has already carried subtle ebbs and flows with it over the past five years. After the “catching up with miserylab” release of Seems Like Forever, 2020’s Cryptology felt like a proper bridging of the past and future of Porl King’s work, working some hints of the band’s more dramatic roots into the stripped down and sober sound of miserylab. New LP Under The Weather continues to link King’s past with his present, but also pulls the listener back into a much universal and much more recent past.
There’s no beating around the bush: Under The Weather is a record written during and directly about the pandemic. As if the title and cover art weren’t enough to pull you back to the fear and confusion of 2020, track after track on the record refers to COVID denialism, the depression of isolation, the prioritizing of the economy over safety, and all of the other cheery experiences we suffered through as a species. On the one hand that doesn’t make for easy listening if you like to think of goth rock as a semi-romantic escape from the mundane, but revisiting painful truths has been King’s MO for the past decade and a half via miserylab. The sorts of themes which that project addressed – austerity, class conflict, political indoctrination – align almost too perfectly with the harsh realities of COVID, and the pull-no-punches style of that project runs thematically through Under The Weather.
That’s not to say that we’re back to basics with the musical approach of the record. More than ever, it’s difficult to distinguish the different modes and periods of Rosetta Stone and King’s other work, not to mention his influences, in the thoroughly blended style of Under The Weather. You could point to the galloping melodies of “All The Devils” as a callback to the band’s most romantic dalliances, and the moody pluck of “Words To That Affect” isn’t too far off from “An Eye For The Main Chance” at its core, yet the austere, stripped-down instrumentation of miserylab remains in those. There are also plenty of indications that King’s time in the droning, post-witch house landscapes of In Death It Ends still holds some sway over the rebooted Rosetta Stone, with the hypnotic bass groove and hazy atmosphere of closing track “Change” hearkening back to that phase in King’s corpus (with perhaps a soupçon of the Sisters’ “Train” to boot), along with the pinched boogie of “Sick And Tired”.
As with the previous two records released under the Rosetta Stone banner, Under The Weather finds King engaging cautiously with his own legacy. He clearly sees the value in both the name and the style of Rosetta Stone, but isn’t interested in trying to recreate second-wave bombast purely for nostalgia’s sake. Nor, as the theme of the record shows, is he interested in sweeping history (artistic or global) under the rug for the sake of simplicity. Eschewing both the “radical new direction” and “return to classic form” cliches may make this new incarnation of Rosetta Stone a bit more difficult to pin down, but I’m guessing that suits King just fine.
