Review: Gabriella Rose grieves on mental health & death row with debut EP, ‘Lost in Translation’
Soul-pop newcomer examines capital punishment, mental health and lost dreams on her debut EP.
There have been nearly 1,500 executions since 1976. The peak year was 1998 when a whopping 98 individuals met the blunt end of life. In recent years, conversations of mental health have come into clearer picture, as The American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association and other organizations have urged leniency for the severely mentally ill. Capital Punishment continues to be a petrie dish of heated debate with many arguing the ethical implications. The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics carefully considers the moral weight. “The taking of human life is permissible only if it is a necessary condition to achieving the greatest balance of good over evil for everyone involved,” writes Claire Andrew, in collaboration with Manuel Velasquez. “Given the value we place on life and our obligation to minimize suffering and pain whenever possible, if a less severe alternative to the death penalty exists which would accomplish the same goal, we are duty-bound to reject the death penalty in favor of the less severe alternative.”
Breaking the top-soil of such layered moral quandaries, pop luminary Gabriella Rose confronts issues of humanity, sanity and our role in continuing the cycle of destruction with her song “The Chair.” Foot-stomps and a ghoulish choir of chains crash and break as waves onto jagged rock, bubbles lapping at her feet in an insatiable display of sadness. “Mother your little boy’s sick / I don’t know why my hands are red / Mother, I’m scared of what I did / Now, they’ve locked me up and left me for dead,” she sings, gutting the listener clean and turning the screws of every emotion. Rose, who drew inspiration from Truman Capote’s In My Blood, combs the most brutally harrowing, dusty corners of human consciousness for a story that’s never been more relevant. “In many cases, killers are described as ’demonic’ and purely evil,” she has explained in press materials of the sing, which emerges as the throbbing heart of her debut EP (and perhaps the best song of 2019). “However, I don’t think these individuals are too far gone. They are suffering from a terrible affliction, and I feel strongly that they need help.”
Maximum impact, though, comes much later. “This chair, they strapped me up / I’m sorry mom, I really do love you / And the man in the mask, he looks at me and laughs / And screams that this is what I deserve / And my head is a mess, I can’t catch my breath / I can’t find the perfect final words,” she extends in breathy murmurs. She’s stepped into the role as a murderer on death row, taking care to soak her words in beauty and compassion, and her performance is downright chilling. On the hook, the character’s life drips out as water into a drain pipe, “He was given a count, (1,2,3) / They fried his brains out, (1,2,3) / The only sound, (1,2,3) / The screams from his mouth…”
Rose’s Lost in Translation (produced by Chris Molitor) is an altogether devastating, yet exemplary, collective of the mental hellscape. “She started cutting her skin / Because to them, it was much too thin / She loved the color red, she watched it spill onto the bed,” she cries out on “Welcome to the Dollhouse,” arms showered in blood and draining her spirit of all color. It’s a deceptively confetti-constructed production, guitars flaking in the background, but it’s a testament to her daring to address critical components of the human existence with such beguiling, captivating arrangements. In doing so, she’s dismantling the stigma brick-by-brick, framing her anguish (she had a brief stay in a mental ward) as a device to find relief and strength, not only for herself but for the world. “I know that a huge number of drug users are self medicating for mental health issues they can’t fix. It’s a method of escape,” she says.
With “Requiem,” another tear-laced ballad about her grandmother, whose once mighty dreams for literature and poetry collapsed like a card house around her, Rose plots an entrancing waltz through fleeting passages of time. “I stopped dreaming; I always hit the ceiling / You take the money and run / I’m so homesick for a place that don’t exist / Your heart is shaped like a gun,” she mutters as she sweeps across a crystalline ballroom floor, nicely polished but filthy with heartache. “Dreams” likewise unpacks a similar emotional punch, an unexpected sucker-jab to her jaw from someone in whom she placed all her trust. “I’m an insufferable pessimist,” she says, only half-joking. But within the bespattered layers of guitar, her melancholic nature washes over your skin, suffocating you, too.
That’s just Gabriella Rose’s way. She smacks you in the face, the heart, the soul with tremendously visceral songwriting. Even the titular cut, as jangly and free-spirited as it flies head-first into the sun, a callback to the Bill Murray film, engages with her unease of belonging. “It’s all the same, send me a sign / It isn’t easy to make you mine,” she wrestles, gently swaying to the beat of tambourine. The gloss deceivingly hints at trouble gurgling in her skull, but she beckons you further into the storm, not to torment you but to make you understand. And you will. You’ll not only get to know Rose rather intimately, but you’ll come to accept your own irrefutable fault lines, for better and for worse.
Photo Credit: Chris Molitor
