Our Album Of The Month for January is the delicious, warm-hug-of-a-record Prize by Rozi Plain, who has graciously signed some copies of the LP and a handful of special postcards!

Prize was made for the small, mediative moments in the every day. It was made for sunbathing in a park in the middle of Summer whilst the sun lights your closed eyelids with pink. For slow Sunday mornings when the coffee is hot and the ground is frosty. It’s a dreamy sequence from a film, embracing you with its wonderfully minimal and gentle vibrance. In the Guardian’s review of Prize, Sophie Walker opens with ‘listening to Rozi Plain is like searching for shapes in the clouds’, and that’s exactly it. Nail on the head.

Plain, longtime bass player for This Is The Kit, uses her fifth studio album as a chance to chronicle her fifteen-year, multi-faceted career. Beginning pre-pandemic, composed and recorded everywhere from Glasgow and the Isle of Eigg, to a seaside village in French Basque Country, Margate, and London’s legendary Total Refreshment Centre, Prize may sound effortless but creating each song was as industry intensive as spinning a spider’s web. A cast of fifteen feature, including Kate Stables (This Is The Kit), contemporary jazz titan Alabaster De Plume, Gerard Black of Glasgow’s Babe, and Minneapolis based saxophonist Cole Pulice, which brings together the sense of connection and community laced throughout the record, highlighting that it takes a village to create such an intimate-feeling, bright body of work.

Simple articulations and repetitive riffs are at home here, stripping back to basics, with Plain’s vocal strength really shining on tracks such as Complicated and, my personal favourite with a very apt call-and-response chorus, Prove Your Good. The repetition of phrases working alongside the cyclical riffs from the electric guitar she built herself. Dreamy jazz elements run through Spot Thirteen, with soft synths and textured beats trickling next to beautiful harmonies on Help.

We may only be in January but this could be in the running for a certain end-of-year list already. A gentle, mindful piece of work that is going to be on the shop stereo for some time.

Lola / Monorail

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Over the course of four albums, Rozi Plain’s hypnotic, gently askew songs have steadily sauntered their way from her birthplace of Winchester, reverberated through the bustling Bristol DIY scene, to where they now emanate from London’s creative epicentre. Acquiring a worldliness that’s reflected in her travels as a touring musician, each consecutive release has broached new sonic territory, whilst retaining a home-grown intimacy and a familial warmth of spirit.

On Prize, her upcoming fifth long-player, due for release on Memphis Industries on 13 January 2023, Rozi’s unique, heart-felt approach continues to prevail, marking her as one of our most innovative and engaging songwriters.

At the core of Rozi’s idiosyncratic sound, there is a keening for simplicity; a recurring urge to strip things back to their essence, to reveal their innate beauty. Rozi uses hersingular unaffected vocal accompanied by an electric-guitar she built herself. Chords are broken into cyclical, meditative patterns of plucked staccato figures. These punchy, quietly complex entrancing arpeggios reel you in, crucially allowing room for reflection and collaboration. 

On Prize, Rozi has assembled her widest cast of players to create an album that not only preserves the intimacy of her signature guitar-and-vocal sound, but accentuates these moments of calm, and explosive emotion, midst a soaring, collective spirit. From the blissful vocals of This Is The Kit’s Kate Stables and Alabaster DePlume’s soft saxophone on ‘Agreeing For Two’, to the call-and response vocals on ‘Prove Your Good’; from the expansive instrumentation and ornately co-ordinated arrangements of Help’ and ‘Sore’, to the sublime synth celebration explorations of ‘Painted The Room’, and the woozy jazz-inflected ‘Spot Thirteen’; there’s a sense of togetherness, and the very process of coming together, that permeates throughout the album’s ten tracks.