Roselit Bone residency at the Phoenix Bar Edinburgh
💀💀💀💀💀💀 Review
Roselit Bone, a band who tout a gothic country punk sound peppered with raw rockabilly and mariachi rhythms are like a band from a fever dream infused with the nightmarish world of David Lynch. Yes that intriguing and startlingly good!
My route to finding them was that modern and slightly bizarre way I imagine lots of folk find new music these days - though social media in a kind of accidental way. A friend sent me a request to like a bar back in April and instead of liking I clicked events and found Roselit Bone. I clicked interested for a gig in August and thought no more. Until August when an alert told an event I was interested in was coming up.
That was when I discovered that they were playing eighteen nights during the annual Edinburgh Fringe as part of the Free Festival. No pre-bought tickets, audiences just show up on the night....or don't. It took me a while to show my face to be true.
I finally made it along on the penultimate night of their run. My god. Why, oh why had I not made it along earlier in their run? The stripped down acoustic iteration of the band were both seriously odd and exceptionally powerful. Led by Josh McCaslin on vocals and guitar, aided and amply abetted by Faith Grossnicklaus on fiddle and Nate Lown on bass they had stage presence and then some. Josh and Nate's pale faces were highlighted with make-up which gave them the otherworldly demeanour of 1920s silent western actors and Faith, similarly pale skinned, channelling Rose Maddox, pulled off a glamourous cowgirl look with the twist of her own bird skull bolo and ear-rings.
They looked like the forlorn god children of The Panther Burns crossed with the Gun Club. The music was intense and evocative punctuated with yelps, howls and lonesome whines. The songs are sharply drawn tales of degradation, violence, lust, love, sex, murder and death. Cheery it ain't but it is compellingly captivating. The sound and delivery, not to mention the presentation, pulls the susceptible into its vortex and beguiles like a siren song.
The band's first sojourn to Scotland was an epic run of gigs and my fear and joy is the realisation that had I made it along earlier in the run I may well have found the siren pulling me into the basement room at the Phoenix Bar on a nightly basis. Which would've been no bad thing. No bad thing at all.
https://www.roselitbone.com/
Albums 'Blister Steel' and 'Blacken and Curl' available here https://roselitbone.bandcamp.com/
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