NEWS – Rosa Lavenne
[by steve rastin]
I first came across Rosa Lavenne during lockdown and made a point of checking out her live performance as soon as restrictions allowed.
She describes her songs as being “baroque gothic folk” which accurately describes her sound and as more and more reviewers start to write about her – as they surely will – there will inevitably be an over liberal use of terms such as “mesmeric”, “bewitching” and “haunting”.
Her new single “Under The Oak” is a case in point; the song is nothing more than a simple guitar motif and a multi tracked vocal, but it immediately gets under your skin and draws you into its very core.
Lyrically it’s a song of peaceful refuge, a paean to retreating to a safe place where “nothing’s untold” amid “tales of long, long ago”, and taken at face value it can be embraced as something of warmth and comfort.
Maybe it’s the stark simplicity of the arrangement or maybe it’s Rosa’s voice which is so haunting (there’s THAT word again!!!), but there is an undertow to the song that is somehow unsettling and other worldly, almost like a ghostly presence that remains just out of reach.
It’s certainly a song that makes an excellent introduction to Rosa’s work and, given that her output is prodigious, there will be plenty of music for any new aficionado to work their way through.
Rosa has dates lined up in February at The Waterfront in Deganwy on the 3rd, Rhyl Front Room on the 4th, Rhyl Cove on the 26th and Wrexham Magic Dragon on the 27th.