[image-4]Published May 29, 2008.
Hey Rosetta!
into your lungs (and around in your heart and on through your blood)
(Sonic/Warner)
A listener encountering Hey Rosetta!’s earlier material might have pegged them as the place where Dave Matthews and Matt Good meet, somewhere on the rocky shores of Newfoundland. This new record reveals a complexity and confidence in both the songwriting and performance that resists those casual comparisons. Lead singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Tim Baker is a grandly literate fellow, unafraid to string together couplets like “I’ll send a thousand suns to warm your worthy lungs” (from “A Thousand Suns”), writing songs that skate regularly past the five minute mark. Epic and orchestral, into your lungs crashes loudly into the baroque and that’s at least partly due to maximalist producer Hawksley Workman, and it suits the band’s broad palette and ability. Baker and his cohorts have always had a “go big or go home” aesthetic that occasionally eschews simplicity but they’ve got the chops to pull it off. Here, with shifting textures provided by the road-tested players and many a talented guest musician, including Jenn Grant on backing vocals, the record is anchored throughout by faultless melody lines, often carried by the surging guitar (check out the awesome change at 3:27 of “New Goodbye”). It’s the tunefulness that will take Hey Rosetta! where they’re going. Look out, world.
---Carsten Knox
