On Bloodline, singer-songwriter Mon Rovîa approaches his advanced upbringing with a powerful readability of imaginative and prescient. Born in Liberia in the course of the West African nation’s civil battle, Janjay Lowe was adopted by a white American household that moved across the U.S.; finally, Lowe would come to name Tennessee house. As a teen, he picked up his brothers’ style for Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver, however seeing few Black artists working in that style, Lowe began making R&B. As he discovered a TikTok following, he step by step re-introduced these indie-folk influences, embracing the ukulele he’d performed as a child and coming to acknowledge his place in a protracted lineage of Afro-Appalachian music. Bloodline, his full-length debut, follows a sequence of EPs and represents his most direct reckoning together with his backstory in music.
A current NPR story about trendy protest singers who obtained their begin on TikTok included Mon Rovîa alongside Jesse Welles and Jensen McRae. Mon Rovîa’s music falls someplace between the previous’s state-of-the-world polemics and the latter’s extra introspective fashion; specifically, Lowe shares McRae’s proclivity for mellow 2000s adult-alternative songwriting. However in these songs, that acquainted palette of soothing guitar and fiddle clashes with graphic lyrics. Take “Day on the Soccer Fields,” the place Lowe sings about traumatic childhood recollections over a sliding string mattress: “I keep in mind it/Prefer it was yesterday/AK‑40 pointed at my face.” The dissonance will get outright uncomfortable on “Working Boy,” the place a harmful police encounter intrudes on a singalong refrain as Lowe describes emotions of survivor’s guilt. The method capabilities like a Computer virus (how else would you sneak an anti-genocide music onto CBS beneath right-wing siege?), however in context, it additionally appears like a way of self-soothing.
The album’s most fascinating moments come when Lowe examines his double consciousness, as he reconciles his early Liberian childhood together with his American adolescence. (The problem is aptly represented in his alternative of stage identify: Liberia’s capital metropolis, Monrovia, is called for American President James Monroe, a outstanding supporter of the 1800s colonization motion that despatched free Black folks from America to Liberia.) Lowe tackles this query most poignantly on “Whose Face Am I,” the place he wrestles with not realizing his beginning dad and mom earlier than adoption: “Making an attempt to offer that means to phantom emotions/Craving in my soul, for a reputation I’ll by no means know.” On “Someplace Down in Georgia,” he locations his expertise of life within the American South within the wider context of Black trauma within the area: “Cotton fields turned parking heaps/Metal and stone can’t disguise these stains/Historical past grows within the cracks when it rains.” Even when the music shifts tempos and sounds extra hopeful, Lowe affords no simple solutions.
Nonetheless, it’s unusual to listen to this complexity changed into catchy choruses, which illustrates the album’s central stress: the try to seek out peace in a fractured identification. At 16 tracks, Bloodline sometimes lapses into extra generic imagery about overcoming worry—akin to on “Oh Large World”—and messages which can be heartfelt however much less pointed. “Heavy Foot” admirably appears to be like outward, however partaking with advanced international points just like the jail industrial advanced and the Gaza genocide in back-to-back verses requires extra substantial scaffolding than a easy “they’re by no means gonna maintain us down” stomp-clap refrain can present. The album’s most purely stunning, hopeful observe efficiently turns its gaze towards bigger struggles: “Pray the Satan Again to Hell,” which shares its title with a documentary about an interfaith group of Liberian ladies who pressured the nation’s then-president right into a 2003 peace settlement, ending the civil battle. It’s a charming story, instructed merely and actually in Lowe’s music, with a counterpoint and percussion to offer the story scale. It’s simple sufficient to see the parallels to Mon Rovîa’s mission: staring down the worst of humanity’s violence and assembly it with peace.
