Gary's Hey Rosetta! Review

Listening to the opening track of Into Your Lungs, you can picture lead singer Tim Baker standing in front of you quietly strumming a guitar and warbling the opening lines to New Goodbye. You lean forward in your seat, straining to hear his near whisper and think - Oh good, another acoustic singer/songwriter. But that's his plan, because before you know it you've been descended upon from all sides by the rest of Hey Rosetta!, in a tempest of guitars, strings, harmonies and other controlled chaos. It builds to a hair-raising frenzy before ending in a wall of fuzz and white noise. And that's just the first song.

For anyone who's heard the soundtrack to the movie Once or the band Swell Season, you'll recognize some familiar dynamics, including the ability to crank up the emotion to near heart breaking levels. Baker can go from 0-60 on that scale pretty fast, and does so frequently. In fact you might even argue that the intensity gets jacked up so often on this album (a healthy 60 minutes) that it's almost exhausting. The whisper to a scream velocity is so fast and frequent you may feel like you have emotional whiplash. But it's a cost worth paying when you know the people behind them music mean every word of it.

There's an art and meticulous craft that's gone into the album but not on a pretentious Arcade Fire-level. That said, there are moments when things get a bit "jammy" and the band seems really impressed with itself. These are fleeting moments, but I did find myself thinking - get on with it already - more than once.

Into Your Lungs has a sense of familiarity too, or as my wife succinctly put it: "I feel like these all sound like other songs." This isn't exactly a slight against Hey Rosetta!, but more a testament to how quickly they'll make you feel at home with the material. And why not - there's a lot to love on Into Your Lungs. It's powerful and weighty (Black Heart), it has grand, stomping sing-a-longs (Tired Eyes) and some really well executed 90's style rock (There's an Arc, A Thousand Suns).

It's refreshing to hear bands that have clearly taken time and effort to craft an album from start to finish and not just a collection of tenuously related songs. Hey Rosetta! have seemingly appeared out of nowhere for me, and to echo something Dave said, I'm not sure why. They have all the markings of a band I'd fawn over and yet Polaris is the first time I've heard of them. I hope that changes for them, because this is the kind of band that gets me excited for a Canadian music renaissance. Something akin to the mid-to-late 90s when bands like Local Rabbits, Eric's Trip, Thrush Hermit, Change of Heart et al, were establishing a pretty high bench mark. It's pretty clear what Hey Rosetta! grew up listening to, and by the sounds of things they studied well.