[ATTENDED: September 27, 2018] Rosali
Rosali opened for Graham Coxon. She is a Philadelphia-based singer songwriter with two albums out (her last album got some pretty glowing reviews).
She has a lovely voice which reminded me of Aimee Mann. In fact, a number of times I thought that she might be singing an Aimee Mann song. But the problem was that there were no hooks in her songs. There was nothing to hold on to.
She also had very little stage presence. She stated as much, confessing that stage banter wasn’t her thing. No kidding. One time she asked if anyone watched the news today, after some mild boos, she didn’t follow it up. Every other time that she tuned, she was basically quiet. In fact, she never said her name, the most basic thing you do when tuning your guitar. (I arrived a few minutes late because of the incompetent staff, so maybe she had introduced herself before I got there, but I’m not entirely sure it was her).
The other problem was her guitar. She was playing an electric guitar and was primarily playing slowly, picked notes. But the settings of this guitar–so clean and sharp–were not helping with her voice at all, which was pretty and rather quiet.
She needed either some echo or vibrato or even an acoustic guitar to let the music resonate more. She made a number of chord flubs which is no big deal but which really stood out since she was by herself and her guitar was so unforgiving.
For one or two songs she switched pickups on the guitar and the music was much warmer. That suited her more.
But for the most part I had to put in earplugs because the guitar was so piercing.
Leave a Reply