If their previous offering ‘Gravity Sessions’ was the exorcism, ‘God of the Dead’ is what crawled out from the smoke. With their latest full-length, Rosetta West once again reject the clean lines and industry sheen of modern rock in favour of something messier, older, and far more alive. This is blues-rock scorched by ghostfire; cracked open, unpredictable, and overflowing with visions that don’t wait for permission.
The Illinois cult outfit has always felt more conjured than curated, and ‘God of the Dead’ pushes that instinct to its wildest limits yet. You can hear it from the opening note of ‘Boneyard Blues’, a track that doesn’t strut so much as stumble, seethe, and seduce. It’s skeletal and snarling, like something scraped off a barroom floor and reanimated with fuzz pedals and spite. From there, the album only spirals deeper, taking left turns through post-punk, delta folk, and acid-soaked balladry with zero regard for genre boundaries.
‘God of the Dead’ feels sequenced like a tarot reading, or a fever dream: ‘Tao Teh King’ chants with cryptic mysticism over a hypnotic crawl; ‘Chain Smoke’ leans into skeletal funk with a deadpan snarl; ‘Susanna Jones’ unfolds in two parts like a gothic novella scrawled in lipstick and ash. There are moments of quiet ache (‘My Life’, ‘Summertime’) and moments that sound like vintage Sabbath dosed on peyote (‘Inferno’, ‘Dead of Night’), but all of them hang together in the same thick, incense-drenched air.
Frontman Joseph Demagore remains the band’s prophet and lightning rod, his voice cracked but commanding like someone who’s seen too much and written it all down in notebooks he can’t quite remember burying. He’s less interested in choruses than in incantations, and even when the words blur, the intention rings through: every line sounds lived-in, exhumed rather than composed.
Instrumentally, the band are tighter than they have any right to be given the chaos they channel. Weaver and Scratch trade drum duties like duelists at dusk, each bringing their own storm systems to the kit, while Orpheus Jones keeps the bottom end slithering like a shadow through dry leaves. Guitars buzz, whine, and scream; never polished and always possessed. And when guest spots emerge, like Louis Constant’s low-end pulse on ‘Midnight’ or Caden Cratch’s stormy stomp through ‘Boneyard Blues, they fold in seamlessly like characters drifting into the frame of a larger myth.
What ‘God of the Dead’ achieves, ultimately, is something very few modern records attempt: it conjures a place. Not a physical one, but a psychic terrain, somewhere between the ruins of Americana, the back rooms of blues clubs, and the dreamspace where mysticism and memory get blurred.
In an era of polished nostalgia and passive listening, ‘God of the Dead’ is brave enough to be unwieldy. It doesn’t want your playlist spot. It wants your attention, and maybe a little of your blood. Whether it’s blues, punk, folk, or something unnamed slithering between the cracks, Rosetta West have once again delivered a record that doesn’t just sound like something, it sounds like somewhere.
File it under: not safe for background noise. This is for the headphones, for the late-night drive, and for the candlelit room where you go to figure out who you really are. Rosetta West never cared much about where they fit, and ‘God of the Dead’ proves, yet again, that the edges are where the magic still happens.
