Rosetta Stone - Under the Weather (2024)

Country: UK
Style: Gothic Rock
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 30 Aug 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Instagram | Twitter | Wikipedia

Rosetta Stone are a gothic rock band from the second wave, formed as far back as 1988 but with a surprisingly skimpy output for that long life. Their debut album was An Eye for the Main Chance in 1991 but this is only their fourth regular studio release since then, with two others that may count depending on your personal definitions. Either way, they don't release new albums often but this one follows Cryptology by only four years.

They're very much a pop-oriented goth band who used to feature jingly guitars that have morphed into electronica over the years. I haven't heard them in decades, so my memory may be letting me down, but they sound very electronic now, the three participants (for want of a better term) easily distinguished but all highly prominent. The vocalist is Porl King, who used to play guitar, but likely didn't this time out, and keyboards, which I'm sure he still does. Vocals aside, he's overshadowed a lot of the time by Madame Razor, the drum machine that almost defines the band's sound now.

That leaves Karl North on bass, who reminds of Peter Hook from Joy Division and New Order, both of which would seem to count as obvious influences. Many songs here find Joy Division vibes, not least Words to That Affect, but they're always flavoured by the drum machine, which makes them more electronic and thus more reminiscent of New Order. The bass isn't the first thing that grabs our attention, but it gradually grows until we simply can't ignore it, at which point I found myself actively following it, whatever else was happening.

The best bassline here is surely on Coherence, seven tracks in, but the more we focus on the bass, the more good basslines show up, starting with the opening title track, also the first single. It's a crucial note that my favourite songs are the ones with my favourite basslines. The beats work for me, in the sense that they contribute a needed and worthy aspect to the overall sound, but they don't play better to me on any one song than any other. King's vocals work for me too, but in that same sense. Occasionally, he delivers a line in a catchier fashion, like the choruses to We Turned Away or All the Devils, but he fundamentally does the same thing across all these tracks.

So this became almost entirely about the bass for me, starting most of the way through my first listen, with only the occasional keyboard riff helping to elevate one song over another, as on We Turned Away. That means that Coherence remains my favourite song, because it has my favourite bassline, but then it's probably Host and All the Devils, along with Under the Weather. This feels weird to me, because I can't remember another album where the bass dictates my appreciation this much, so I tried to figure out why.

I think it boils down to Rosetta Stone having such a stripped down sound, which is unusual for the sort of band that's survived for almost forty years intact. With the vocals telling stories and the drums merely keeping beat, it would normally fall to the guitars or keyboards to drive the songs forward, but they don't seem to want to do that. The keyboards are there but they feel more like decoration than rhythm and, if there are guitars at all, I mistook them for keyboards. Thus it falls to Karl North to play his bass like it's a rhythm guitar and a bass put together. It also means that a song is a song, because there's nothing in the instrumentation that can really apply emphasis.

And that's fine, but I tend to prefer my gothic rock denser in sound, whether it's the gothic rock of the Sisters of Mercy or the gothic metal of Tristania. Rosetta Stone aren't interested in density of sound and actively seem to avoided any possibility of crunch. So, while they still sound gothic, they remind me more of Joy Division than the Sisters, but still not as dense, meaning that, while I liked this, I always felt there was something missing.