Let’s get the vitals out of the way: 135 beats per minute, indie-punk in its DNA, and produced by Eric Emery, a man whose CV \u2014 Blink-182, Alice Cooper, Yellowcard \u2014 reads like the liner notes to somebody’s misspent adolescence. That pedigree matters here, because what Emery has done is strip away the gauzy introspection that made Rosene’s earlier work (Raised on Porn, Everyday Existential Crisis) feel like eavesdropping on someone’s diary, and replaced it with something closer to a dare. This is Rosene stripped of her hedges and her whispers, turned up until the needle bends.<\/p>
And bend it does. Where her back catalogue built its power on restraint \u2014 on the sense of a singer holding something enormous just barely in check \u2014 this single detonates that tension outright. The melody doesn’t build so much as bolt; it’s less “verse-chorus-verse” than a woman sprinting toward a cliff edge and daring the ground to disappear. That’s the trick of great punk-inflected pop: it convinces you recklessness is a moral position, not just an aesthetic one. Rosene sells it completely.<\/p> Thematically, this is Rosene at her most gleefully blasphemous and, paradoxically, her most sincere. The seduction-of-God conceit could easily curdle into shock-value posturing in lesser hands, but there’s something almost devotional about the audacity \u2014 this is not an atheist’s sneer, it’s a believer’s tantrum, the sound of someone who takes heaven seriously enough to want to cheat her way in. It’s playing god and needling god in the same breath, which is a far more interesting position than simple provocation. Call it theology with its lipstick smudged.<\/span><\/p> Vocally, this is the record where Rosene stops asking for your attention and starts assuming it. The “vast vocal range” and “electrifying composition” that Nova Music Blog clocked in her earlier work are present and correct, but now they’re deployed with a swagger that feels earned rather than performed \u2014 less a singer showing off her instrument, more a woman who’s realised the instrument was a weapon all along. Dancing About Architecture wasn’t exaggerating when they said she stands head and shoulders above her contemporaries; on this evidence, she’s now actively looking down at them.<\/span><\/p> “I’ll Seduce God to Get Into Heaven” is a genuine event: a songwriter shedding her caution in real time and discovering she sounds even better unguarded. Madeline takes the whole pot. Heaven, frankly, should be worried.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
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