ROSETTA WEST Gravity Sessions

Rosetta West’s Gravity Sessions is a raw, spiritual eruption of sound, captured in the fleeting magic of a few days at Chicago’s legendary Gravity Studios. Long known for their fusion of blues rock, psychedelia, and mysticism, the Illinois-based trio channels something ancient and unpolished in this latest release. There’s an urgency here not just in the music, but in the way it was made. Recorded almost entirely live with minimal overdubs and Doug McBride at the helm, the album pulses with the honesty of a band stripping themselves down to essence and letting the imperfections become power.

From the opening track, Gravity Sessions radiates a strange, alluring tension the kind that lives between ritual and rebellion. Joseph Demagore’s guitar snarls and moans with soulful precision, his vocals landing somewhere between a preacher’s wail and a haunted storyteller’s whisper. Herf Guderian’s bass lumbers like a spirit through shadowy corridors, grounding the swirl of noise in something earthy and ceremonial. Meanwhile, Mike Weaver’s drumming feels tectonic, shifting the emotional plates of each track with thuds that feel simultaneously ancient and urgent.

Each song seems to be reaching for something intangible not just musical catharsis, but a deeper, more elusive kind of truth. Tracks like “Dora Lee (Gravity)” lean into the band’s psychedelic tendencies, offering a blurred and hypnotic vision of memory, myth, and melancholy. Rosetta West doesn’t play songs so much as summon them, blending bluesy structures with unexpected textures that evoke desolate landscapes and spiritual reckonings. The result is a soundscape where boundaries dissolve, and you’re not quite sure whether you’re hearing a concert, a prayer, or a storm.

McBride’s production choice to leave the sounds raw and mostly untouched enhances the sense of presence. There’s room noise, there’s fret noise, and sometimes a sudden burst of feedback, but rather than detract, these elements draw you deeper into the space with the band. You can almost smell the amps warming up, feel the dust in the cables. It’s an aesthetic of defiance a rejection of polish in favor of presence, a refusal to tame what was always meant to be wild. In this way, Gravity Sessions is both a document and a declaration.

In an era when so much music is designed to disappear into playlists, Rosetta West creates work that stops you in your tracks. Gravity Sessions is a testament to what happens when a band trusts the process, leans into the chaos, and embraces the sacred mess of live performance. This isn’t a comeback or a reinvention it’s a reaffirmation of purpose. For those who crave music with teeth, texture, and transcendence, this is a rare and rewarding find. Seek it out not just on Spotify or YouTube, but in the wilder corners of the web, where their untamed spirit truly lives.

Written by Patrick