Rosetta West have always worshipped at the altar of rawness, but Gravity Session treats that devotion like a holy rite. Tracked in a furious three-day blur at Chicago’s storied Gravity Studios with engineer Doug McBride, the record feels less like a polished retrospective and more like a séance—seven fan-favourite cuts summoned in real time, candle smoke curling around battered amplifiers. You can practically hear the fluorescent buzz of the live room before Joseph Demagore’s first guitar scrape, as if the mics caught not just the performances but the room’s nervous system.
Opener “Dora Lee” needs only one snarling riff to announce the stakes. Demagore’s guitar claws at the downbeat while Mike Weaver’s toms tumble like artillery shelling, echoing the lyric’s confrontation with war-lust and the shadow gods—Ishtar, Kali, Hecate—who feast on conflict. The nearly untouched mix leaves every cymbal overtone shimmering like phosphorescence in dark water, and when Herf Guderian’s bass drops into the bridge with a subterranean slide, the track feels seismic, primitive, irresistibly alive.
“Suzie” flips the vibe from pagan thunder to acid-bright jangle, a Chicago blues shuffle fed through a kaleidoscope. Demagore delivers his lines with sly warmth—part seasoned mystic, part roadhouse raconteur—and the chorus blooms into wordless harmonies that recall early Traffic. It’s the first hint of the band’s world-folk streak: tamboura drones flirt with the backbeat, and a cheap melodica wheezes a melody that sounds half-borrowed from a Marrakesh street band. The whole thing shouldn’t cohere, yet under McBride’s hands-off philosophy, it sings like a single organism.
On “Broken Glass”, Rosetta West give psychedelia a gospel spine. A humid Hammond B-3 swirls beneath Demagore’s slide guitar, which yelps and sobs like steel being bent by invisible forces.
Lyrically, it’s a hymn to fragile hope—“all these shards can catch the light if we just tilt the sun”—but the performance is anything but delicate. Weaver’s kit sounds enormous, every kick drum a footstep from something colossal, and you realise how essential the live-in-studio approach is: the song would suffocate under overdubs.
If “Deeper Than Magic” is the record’s prayer, “Save Me” is the exorcism. Five and a half minutes of coiled, quasi-Arabic riffing unwind into a coda where Demagore half-chants, half-pleads against a maelstrom of backwards cymbals and throat-singing samples. It’s utterly uncommercial, gleefully strange, and it crystallises what the band have chased since the ’90s: blues as portal, rock as ritual. When the final feedback howl dissolves, you may find your pulse louder in your ears.
“Baby Doll” offers a breather, sort of. On paper, it’s a bar-band two-step, but Rosetta West smuggle in flutes, cowbells, and a breakbeat that would make the Meters grin. The levity is welcome; it reminds you that mysticism can dance. And then, without warning, “Venous Blue” rolls in like midnight storm clouds. The closing track is a dirge-turned-cosmic jam, Guderian’s bassline pulsing like slow blood while Demagore stacks modal solos that climb, spiral, and finally vanish into a tape-echo abyss. It’s the sound of a band staring into the void and deciding to play louder.
Gravity Session doesn’t bother polishing its edges—why sand down the splinters if they’re what make the grip real? Instead, Rosetta West give us an artefact of presence: of three musicians in a room, trusting decades of telepathy and letting Doug McBride’s mics catch lightning. In an era of infinite digital takes, their approach feels rebellious, even sacred. The result is an album that thrums with heat, risk, and the ragged glory of first takes—a reminder that gravity is a force that pulls us down in the hands of Rosetta West, keeps the spirit anchored while the mind goes hurtling outward.
For more information, follow Rosetta West on Bandcamp, Spotify and YouTube.
