Roja
Album: Promises I Should Have Kept
Label: Probe Plus
Tracks: 11
Website: http://www.facebook.com/rojamusica

If they shot spaghetti westerns in Liverpool, Roja would provide the soundtrack, in fact "Promises I Should Have Kept" would probably be the title of the movie. Try to imagine the likes of Calexico throw into the urban environment of the English North West and that will give you some short hand to the band.

Born from the ashes of a previous venture from frontman and songwriter, Simon Bradshaw, alt.country rockers, Marlowe, Roja manage to combine that scouse cynicism and humour and bury it in an urbanised Ennio Moricone land/soundscape.

There is a real movie quality to "Promises I Should Have Kept". Opening with the debut single "The Evil Stands High" the album, together with accompanying horns, percussion, take you into a dark underbelly of the human psyche.

Like any decent spaghetti western worthy of the name, "Promises I Should Have Kept" does have that brooding sense of danger, but like the movies on which this is modelled, there are the lighter, and dare I say romantic, interludes, songs that that provide not only a lighter break, but also serve to give the darkness a wider range of tones.

Both Roja and "Promises I Should Have Kept" have a real sense of scale, this is big music, a big sound, songs like "Yeah I Could" help push a regional identity into a sound that you could argue is an opposite pole to the location it's in, but boy does it work and work well, maybe if the Beatles had headed to Mexico rather than India…

Neil King