FaithNYC is a vehicle for the singer and songwriter Felice Rosser, an original rooted in reggae,soul, punk and the New York downtown avant-garde. She once played in an all-woman reggae band, Sistren, and was a close friend of Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Rosser is very fortunate in having teamed up with producer Justin Adams, the British guitarist whose music takes many different shapes, from blues to Moroccan trance music, and most of all a rare gift for collaboration, which ranges from the Gambian fiddle player Juldeh Camara and the Puglian singer, violinist and tambourine virtuoso Mauro Durante, from Robert Plant to the Gnawa master Mohamed Errebbaa. Adams is one of those musicians who is blessed with a sense of what makes other musicians zing: to reach into their essence and play their very best.
Adams responds to Felice Rosser’s tunes, lyrics and voice with extraordinary finesse. She sings in a moody contralto, with great force, and yet, when it’s called for, in more introspective material, with a sensitivity that allows space for her vulnerability. The instrumentation – Rosser’s solid yet fluid bass, and her husband Fin Hunt’s intricate and very personal percussion, along with layers of Adams’s guitar, suitably distorted, treated, and subject to all manner of tastefully applied electronic tone-bending – works perfectly well. The opening track “Love is a Wish Away” shuffles relentlessly, and invites the listener to the dance. The music is at once explosive and restrained, qualities that mirror something essential in Rosser’s highly individual vocals. There are reggae-reflected tracks – though never as pastiche – and others that owe much to the mind-altering resonance of dub.
On “Eagle Street” Rosser sounds more vulnerable, almost on the edge of tears, though never mawkish. Adams has created a sound that builds over the length of the track, punctuated by reverb-laden mallet strokes on a cymbal. “Love in a Silent Way”, another track with disarmingly personal lyrics, feels swampy and stoned, with once again, plenty of reverb on the voice track,
The best track on the album is “Everything is Always Around You” which moves forwards, propelled by hypnotic repetition, with once again, just the right amount of echo on the voice. It’s a call for joy, but devoid of rose-tinted spectacles, a track full of soul, suggesting the surrender of trance, but in a surprisingly tempered way.
This is a delightfully off-piste album, a labour or great love, that’s for sure. No cheap tricks that keep it in the comfort zone but tons of invention and surprising sound. Most of all, one that will undoubtedly benefit from repeated listening, as the many treasures are buried deep, at the heart of its creative soul.
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