REVIEW/INTERVIEW: Rosa Mota Wishful Sinking (Mute)

- John Walker

Julie Rumsey, Rosa Mota's guitarist, flutist (!), and co-lead vocalist (she of the ethereal harmonizing and--less often--Flying Lizards-ish deadpans) is rightfully pissed off. Her band has just come out with one of the top albums of the year in Wishful Sinking, a tour de force of the various hues and colours of existence as seen from a place outside of the world of bourgeois constrictions, and yet all the British press can talk about is the new "Pop Scene" spearheaded by Oasis and Blur.

"We often get a raw deal from the British press because they don't know how to categorize us", she snaps. "We've actually had some snarky reviews accusing us of 'ignoring the British Pop Revival.'" If she actually wasn't so nice, you'd swear that the comely Ms. Rumsey was ready to punctuate that last statement with a projectile of saliva. "We've got to get out of here," she goes on. "It's doing us in."

Rosa Mota are the underbelly of the current Pop scene in Britain, bringing the dark intensity of alternative rock's pre bland-out 80s roots--The Birthday Party, Bauhaus, Echo & The Bunnymen--back to a scene currently wallowing in light. No musical snob, however, Rumsey even goes so far as to praise Elastica, who at least rehash new wave "with passion," bringing welcome attention, with songs like "Waking Up" to "criminally forgotten" bands like the early Stranglers, whose musically inventive explorations of the gutter are emulated--but not imitated--by Rosa Mosa.

They key to Wishful Sinking's stunning success as a work of art lies in the artistic interplay between co-founders Rumsey and main lyricist, vocalist and second guitarist Ian Bishop, an alumnus of Ultra Vivid Scene. Bishop's artfully decadent poetic vision, similar in style and intent to UVS brainchild Kurt Ralske's, yet perhaps more free-ranging, is reflected and refracted throughout incandescent Wishful Sinking numbers like "Smack Scratch" and "Stripped And Bleeding." The latter tune especially encompasses the ideal Rosa Mota aesthetic, moving from heavy to light (Rumsey adding some gorgeous flute) and back again, leaving the listener exhilarated.

This motif of "peaks and troughs." or as I put it to Rumsey, "ebbs and flows" ("that's good, put that in" she chuckled) was honed with the very able help of Robin Proper-Sheppard, the main main behind the sadly defunct--due to the untimely death of bassist Jimmy Fernandez, to whom Wishful Sinking is dedicated--God Machine, whose two albums Scenes From The Second Storey and One Last Laugh From A Place Of Dying are top ten of the decade material in this critic's book. Happily for GM fans, Wishful Sinking is more than worthy to sit among the aforementioned company.

Rumsey speaks of Sheppard and the GM in the most glowing of terms: "Ian met Robin at a session for another band, where he was overdubbing a clarinet part (eclectic bunch, these Rosas)." The leader of the still-learning-to-crawl Motas then invited Robin along to one of their gigs, not thinking that he'd actually show. He did, and the rest is musical history.

"Robin has understood what we were doing from the beginning, and where we wanted to go", Rumsey enthuses. After producing an initial demo for the band, Sheppard was unfortunately unavailable for the band's first mini-lp, A Drag For A Drag, an ominously titled clunker which left the band "devastated," according to Rumsey. With Wishful Sinking, however, the pieces have been picked up and reassembled in a very big way.

"The parallel with the God Machine is the fact that we go at it with a similar intensity", notes Rumsey adding that a short joint tour with the GM provided Rosa Mota with a "massive adrenalin rush: we'd get one when we played, then we'd watch them and get another one. By the end of the night we'd be completely exhausted." Natural highs, indeed.

An evening spent in the company of Wishful Sinking, I might add, leaves the listener in a similar, blissfully drained state. Nothing is automatically excluded in this happy collision of heterogenous musical sensibilities. From Bishop raging "I don't know you / I don't want to / I don't lie / Cause I don't need to" in the powerful "Always With Wings," to the blissed out, meditative centerpiece "Deepness," which features Bishop and Rumsey's voices intertwining in a most deliriously enticing manner (aural sex?), Rosa Mota is the real, uncalculated thing, an anomaly in an age of pre-fab rock stars. In the beginning, "the very idea of doing a gig was hugely amusing to us" says Rumsey. "If you're doing things purely to make money, go ahead and follow the rules. You'll be here today and gone tomorrow."

Rosa Mota, I predict, will be around for the long haul.