Rose Windows
Rose Windows
SUB POP
6/10
“Maybe if I’m youthful even when I’m old / I’ll have understood this better than I’ve known,” sings Rabia Shaheen Qazi on Rose Windows’ penultimate track “A Pleasure to Burn.” Her raspy voice pierces through a building Hammond organ wail and her words burrow their way right into your brain. There’s a heaviness surrounding Rose Windows’ sophomore—and final—album. It’s nothing tragic, spiteful, or even depressing; it’s just a looming sense of confusion and trying to understand one’s place in the world. The warm and raw analog sound of Rose Windows’ nine tracks is comforting, allowing the Seattle-based indie-folk sextet to experiment thematically, as opposed to instrumentally. Solid beats, tambourine jangles, intermediate guitar riffs—it’s all there—but what’s beneath the down-home exterior is a group exhausted of fighting (“Glory, Glory”), inequality and helplessness (“Strip Mall Babylon”), trying to find meaning within past mistakes (“The Old Crow”). While the group was wrestling with itself, it produced a mature piece of rock-induced therapy. The band’s official announcement of its dissolution probably says it best: “Sometimes we have to learn to walk away instead of holding on. We’ve held on for a long while but the time has come for release.”
