According to their bio, Mexico City formed earlier this century and owe their name to a red-light district bar in Albert Camus’ novel The Fall. With these themes of exploration of innocence, imprisonment, truth and non-existence you can begin to paint a picture of what kind of listening experience you’re in for with their new track Rosewood Line. The band have been traipsing the murky backwaters where country, blues and soul is rock and roll and they have remained immersed in that songwriting tradition over two EPs and two albums, Black Comedy and Brown Bird. The lads are now returning with a taste of things to come in the form of their new single.
Mexico City take their country rock on a sunset road trip in their new single Rosewood Line bringing along their storytelling lyrics and country guitars
As a part of their upcoming album to be titled When The Day Goes Dark, Rosewood Line has everything you could want in a song, a brooding swagger, bruised egos and a reckless abandon. As lyrics like “The day is almost done, the week stretched to its end and the sunsets on the rising line…And now the sky has turned red, blue and gold on the Rosewood line” they could very well be referring to the small town of Rosewood, Queensland but it’s the type of lyric that strikes a chord in any listener, perhaps referring to the gorgeous Rosewood seen in the making of many iconic guitars. This lyric resonates as an instantly familiar line that is just vague enough to create a romanticized country image.
https://soundcloud.com/plusonerecords/01-rosewood-line?in=plusonerecords/sets/mexico-city-when-the-day-goes/s-6KVkG
When the track picks up, the rolling snares help evoke the feeling of driving through abandoned yet starkly beautiful country, the kind of driving you do when running from something. For those that have written country music off as the genre made for pick-up trucks, cheap wine, tailgating and misogyny would do well to give it another listen, and are likely to change their tune. When done well and brought back to its bare roots, country borrows heavily from the blues and, like Rosewood Line, it’s filled to the brim with authentic emotion.
Soon, as the organ begins to swell in the background, the listener begins to see that while Rosewood Line could have been written in the confines of a four-walled garage it was crafted for a wide open space and fills that space comfortably. If this track is any indication of the forthcoming album then it should be an intense but highly rewarding experience to encounter and to absorb.
Mexico City will launch their new album on March 24 at The Junk Bar in Brisbane.
