Rosetta Stone
Executing Nostalgia
Cleopatra Records
Despite Porl King’s formal reactivation of the Rosetta Stone name happening a full seven years ago, it’s been remarkably tricky to pin down a specific sound or approach which has defined this era of King’s work. There have been reappraisals of interregnum work under the miserylab handle, syntheses of classic Rosetta Stone songwriting and modern production, and a suite of covers delivered with characteristic dryness which blurs the line between irony and earnestness. New release Executing Nostalgia embraces this amorphous fluidity, jamming all of King’s angles on goth rock into a dense forty minute listen.
Without meaning to play armchair psychologist, I’d credit much of this restlessness to the question of King squaring the large bodies of work he recorded under the miserylab and Death It Ends from 2007 to 2018 with the idea of a “return” to Rosetta Stone. The legacy of In Death It Ends in particular may have been the key all along; from the moment a mesh of misty distorted guitar miasma joins the weighty, doomily reverbed bass and resigned, muttering vocals of opener “Shadowban”, that project’s unmistakable mix of classic darkwave and witchhouse is conjured up. There it remains for the remainder of the A-side of original material, mixed into spindly early Sisters fog machine goth on “Someone”, blended with miserylab minimalism on “Regression”, and compounded upon itself on the Soft Moon-like echoes of “Negative”.
On the flip side, a set of five covers also sounds well-integrated and cooked down. Earlier tributes (“The Witch”, “Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves”) hinged upon deft yet tongue slightly in cheek elevations of naff source material to Rosetta Stone’s original, ornately stormy sound, but in choosing a set of ur-goth and relatedly dark tracks for Executing Nostalgia‘s back half, that issue vanishes. These are clearly tunes which helped shape King’s youthful tastes, and whether it’s the tempestuous “Incubus Succubus”, the high camp of the Prunes’ “Pagan Love Song”, or the sly shadowcraft of Colin Newman’s oft-overlooked “Alone”, they’re delivered forthrightly.
From a purely musical perspective at this point in the Rosetta Stone reboot, opting to close the record with the looping, machine-like rhythmic punch of The Lorries’ “Talk About The Weather” is a subtle masterstroke. Partially made up of the sort of sparse clatter and jangle associated with miserylab but shot through with the sort of impassioned vocal vitriol which illuminated early Rosetta Stone material and the right winding guitar to suit, King’s version is almost slavishly true to the original, yet in that manner it draws together just about all the corners of his various epochs, a fitting marker of Rebooting Nostalgia‘s everything and the kitchen sink approach.
