Rosetta follows up last year’s The Anaesthete with a concise 30-minute EP on Translation Loss. Having presumably spent less time working on this music, one would think they could buck the recent trend of ghastly album art, no?
Since Isis got out of the post-metal game years ago before their name was run into the ground by ISIS, Rosetta has a claim to the post-metal throne. The band started out strong in 2005 with The Galilean Satellites, and the potent blend of “astronaut metal” has been intriguing ever since. Last year’s album was a darker venture for the band, but Flies to Flame sees the metalnauts returning home for four tracks of unrelenting space metal.
Flies to Flame is looser and more free-flowing release from Rosetta, whose music has gotten more directed and tighter over the years. In this sense, it’s really a back-to-basics kind of release that harkens back the original days of The Galilean Satellites. Opener “Soot,” for instance, could easily be cut from the same cloth as TGS, whereas “Seven Years with Nothing to Show” and “Les Mots et les Choses” are spacier affairs that dive deep into the ambient realm that the band harnesses so well. “Pegasus” wraps things up with a blistering five minutes of metal; Rosetta bookends the EP nicely with a pair of inspiring post-metal and show some diversity to boot.
Few metal bands today offer such consistent quality as Rosetta. For nearly a decade the band has progressed its art and never disappointed its fan base. It’s kept true to the DIY spirit and has steadily become one of the role models for true independent music.