When John Rossiter isn’t telling a character’s story, he turns the focus on his own interior life. The songs on “The Fool” are honest at their core, and often quite heavy, dealing with serious topics. The record is an impressive and engaging work but not an easy listen. Its centerpiece, “Rich,” may well be Rossiter’s masterpiece, but you’ll want to take a moment after finishing it. There are a few different ideas held in the song, and while they are all distinct, they are also tangled together—but Rossiter does his best to parse them. Most strikingly, he sings bluntly about his own mental health struggles, and how mental illness and suicidality are passed down genetically. As he holds this idea in one hand, he also holds the inherited nature of generational wealth in the other—pondering how, though it can’t save people from all struggles, it affords them privilege.
People who have family money are more often free to pursue careers in fields like the arts, and he acknowledges the open secret of it all. Song to song, there isn’t much sonic variation, and after the throw-everything-at-the-wall approach he took on Shepherd Head, the bare-boned arrangements here are refreshing. It’s unlikely that Rossiter will make another record like The Fool, but Young Jesus was already an unpredictable project before it, anyway. Though it can often leave you with a sense of discomfort, it’s remarkable that there isn’t a confrontational edge to The Fool. You don’t get the sense that Rossiter is trying to provoke you, necessarily, and you aren’t being asked to give him brownie points for being in touch with his own emotions. Rossiter has, instead, made something open—something that he needed to make, even if he didn’t know he ever could.
released October 25th, 2024
The Fat Angel Sings 