Rozi Plain – Prize

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Rozi Plain has a wonderful way of leading us into a room and slowly walking us around it, revealing its details to us one by one. 

Her new album, Prize, is a beautiful follow-up to her 2019 album What A Boost, which secured her status amongst indie circles throughout the UK. While many of her familiar idiosyncrasies have been carried into this record, there is a feeling that the sound has been developed and expanded upon. 

As appears to be becoming a tradition in Plain’s work, each song on the record is built upon a short repeated riff of one or two notes, upon which the rest of the music rests, and tension is built and released through textures emerging and dissipating again. Sometimes carried by the bass or sometimes the guitar, this short, repeated riff serves as the bedrock for an expanded sound that is rich in close harmonies, bubbling melodies, and polyrhythms. In another context, some of these sounds might feel uncontained, but anchored by the familiar repetitive riff, moments of chaos are revealed as bursts of beauty. 

One example of this is highlighted in Prove Your Good, which starts with a simple trio of bass, drums and a two-note riff on the guitar, repeating in a hypnotic rhythm. Gradually, instruments are added, building in layers of texture. Close vocal harmonies accompany her lead, synths panned and surrounded, rising, bubbling and disappearing again. Melodies overlap, and new sounds are brought in. Rhythm is playfully approached with a 9/4 time signature, while the two-note riff serves as the constant grounding foundation, a calm centre among the complexity.

The album features Gerard Black on various synths and keyboards. His contributions have had a discernible impact on the record’s overall sound. Synths of varying sounds and textures are used cleverly in different moments throughout, sometimes gentle and ethereal, such as the opening of Spot Thirteen, which has an almost space-like otherworldliness feel to it, and other times rising into brass-like triumphant melodies, such as at the end of Complicated, accompanying the vocals as they exalt “I’m alive! You’re alive!”, a repeated moment of epiphany.

One of my favourite features of Plain’s work is the occasional, extremely well-placed use of orchestral instruments. The delicate tremor of strings, the layering of brass. Songs build evenly into a beautiful score, a marriage between the orchestral and the indie band.

I would be wrong to review a Rozi Plain album without taking note of her lyrics. Few artists have such a unique and distinctive approach to lyricism as Plain; it is a feature that strikes again and again when I listen to her work. 

As always, she remains utterly ambiguous, giving nothing emotional away, and instead playing on commonplace words and phrases, reinventing the mundane and presenting it as philosophical rhetoric. “Do you believe in yourself?” she asks us in Complicated, a repeated line which becomes more meta the more it is enforced. Words are cleverly, humorously played upon “You’re laden / so lay down”, playfully teaching us to think about greater meanings in the passing phrases we speak every day.

While the silky melodies and relaxed, walking-paced rhythms which define Plain’s music are very much present throughout this album, moments in Prize build into a groovy, excited triumph. We get a strong flavour of this in Standing Up. Its oh-so-cool and collected intro lulls us into a sense of hypnosis before the heaviest, most hard-hitting synth is dropped upon us from a great height. It is encompassing, running through the body; it is impossible not to move to; it is brilliance. 

Order Prize: https://lnk.to/Rozi_PRIZE