What does it mean to say that a piece of music sounds like it came from another time? That a ghost or an ancient soul created it? That it favors tradition over modernity? That it sounds not algorithmic but somehow authentic (whatever that might mean)?
All of these statements are true of Baby Rose’s psychedelic soul album Through and Through. Yet the Los Angeles-based musician’s second album doesn’t merely sound like a holdover from another time; it might have come from another timeline altogether. It lives in the swimmy non-existence of lost futures: lifetimes lived only in hope and projection, crushes that never manifested into relationships, loves that never materialized into babies.
The album’s opulent production and heard-through-the-wall thump—as doctored alongside co-producer Tim Maxey—is reminiscent of that dream of the 2010s when the fantasy of wandering an empty mall alone, the sound of a popular song from one’s childhood reverberating through the dead space, was considered the most sublime aesthetic experience imaginable.
On Through and Through, Rose reimagines those empty malls as empty hearts, revisiting past relationships as a solitary figure, willing them into evergreen survival from a place of deep, ecstatic loneliness. “Dance with me like the very first time,” she sings with pleading vibrato on the downtempo “Dance With Me,” her voice beginning front and center in the mix, before Maxey pans her to the left, adding a heavy layer of reverb and creating an effect of distance as she begs her lost lover: “Don’t look behind you.”
Rose’s throaty, bluesy contralto is obviously influenced by Nina Simone’s—an artist she has covered alongside Robert Glasper and the Roots—though there’s some airiness and buoyancy to Rose’s graveness. If Simone’s voice could be likened to the rumbling of an engine, Rose’s is more like the flapping of a propeller. And unlike Simone, who tends to summon doleful gravitas, Rose always seems to land on a lighter note. She lingers over the words as though humbled by the lessons embedded within them. At the end of each line, she seems to come to a place of newfound wisdom and clarity. “Only love can revive us,” she sings on “Go,” the words hanging in the air like an unmanned parachute, dancing in the sky before landing in a field of fluffy bulrush.
It’s a feat for any instrument to compete with a voice like that, one so lived in and prodigiously ancient. The relationship between voice and music on Through and Through manifests as a kind of battle. Light, psychedelic embellishments grounded by deep grooves threaten to wash Rose away, but her oar of a voice pushes against the tide. It’s a dynamic that endows greater urgency to Rose’s fight to live out a lost future—a struggle she eventually loses.
On “Stop the Bleeding”, the album’s outlier and singular moment of total groundedness, Rose sounds at one with the piano—this time sounding up close, and not a room away—as she cries out a series of self-directed questions: “How do I stop? Stop the bleeding? … Stop repeating/The cycle?” The ballad functions as a real-time lesson, a moment of naked self-confrontation before the cycle repeats itself.
Only on “Water,” the penultimate song, do Rose’s voice and the songs’ arrangements reach a kind of détente. Rose slowly loses her presence, the gravel of her voice carried away in the haze of chorused guitar and giddy bass. She relaxes into a peaceful state of acceptance, relinquishing her sense of control, giving her oar to the tide. “Let’s be water,” she sings, the sound of waves pushing her towards the future, and dragging her into another time.
