Album Review: "A Place to Go When You Need to Hide" by Rose Alaimo

Today, I had my third listen to Rose Alaimo’s new album, “A Place to Go When You Need to Hide,” and, having listened three times to the whole thing (and I’ve listened to a few of the songs more than that), I can say with certainty that the wait between her last record, “Grow,” and this one was worth it. She’s knocked it out of the park again with an album that maintains enough of the style of the previous one to appeal to fans of that great collection of songs, while also adding new elements that make it different in many ways. I’m impressed, yet again, just as I was with “Grow,” and with the single, “Orchid,” which continues to be one of my favorite songs ever. Yes, I said ever!

So, clearly, I’m no stranger to Rose’s work, and this new album matches the level of quality I’ve come to expect and fits right into what is a wonderful catalog of music. This is also Rose’s second time working with producer Jamie Hill, and it’s another very fruitful collaboration. As I did with “Grow,’ I’m now going to do with “A Place to Go When You Need to Hide,” and comment on each individual song as I listen yet again.

“A Place to Go When You Need to Hide” (I miss typing “Grow!” It was so nice and short!) opens with “Meet Me Where I Am,” and I’m immediately reminded of what I think is one of the most interesting aspects of a Rose Alaimo song or album. In most cases, it’s not just a piece of music. It’s a zone, a dimension, a place (yes, the album title is appropriate, then, so I can forgive the length of it! And I hope the artist understands that the reviewer is just being a smartass when it comes to the title).

What I mean is, one enters a world when listening to the album. There’s a lot going on musically and it surrounds one, fills the entire attention with a wall of sound, an ocean of stimuli. It’s not just the instrumentation that does this either. The effect of the songs being wholes greater than their individual parts extends to the vocals too. Rose Alaimo isn’t a singer who sings over the music she plays, but a singer whose voice is part of the fabric of the universe she creates. The vocals merge with the music to become one with the guitar, bass, keyboards, drums. It’s all part of the same thing, this entity that each song is. We lose ourselves in this music. And so it becomes a refuge of sorts. It fills the mind and one has no choice but to go with it. Not that one would choose to not go with it, because it’s a very good place to be.

So, back to what actually happens in “Meet Me Where I Am.” Warm keyboard tones swell up to begin the song, signaling that we’re entering this other world. It’s just enough to get things going, put our minds in the proper place to start the journey. It sets the tone, that twenty-five seconds of welcoming before the guitars, bass, drums, and wordless vocals arrive and it starts to rock. Fifty seconds in, we get our first lyrics and find that this is no exercise in just throwing some words together to match the music, but an eloquent piece of poetry that questions our moral decisions and makes references to Dante’s Inferno (which happens to be a piece of literature that’s always fascinated me). This is a heavy song thematically, and it certainly acknowledges the darkness and fear of the time in which it was written, the early days of the Covid pandemic, but it’s not a sad song. It asks questions, but also recognizes hope. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we also don’t know that it’s going to be as bad as we may fear it is. It’s a great beginning to the album and leaves us wanting to know what happens next. Lyrically, it’s profound. Musically, it’s heavy, but not in a doom-laden way. It’s an energetic beginning to the album.

And one little detail I appreciate is that the song ends with the word, “stars,” which is the title of the second track. I assume this was meant to tell us, although it would become obvious soon enough anyway, that this is a concept album and each song connects to the others. We may not have needed to be told this, but I love the way we were.

Now, before we proceed to “Stars,” I’m going to make a guess. When I mentioned the fullness of Rose’s songs, the way the listener’s world just fills with sound, the way there’s just so much going on and surrounding us (though never in an overblown or negative way), it made me think of Pink Floyd, or, more specifically, the very end of the Pink Floyd catalog. Not that Rose Alaimo sounds like Pink Floyd (though there is a David Gilmour kind of tone to some of her guitar work), but that fullness of sound, the meshing together of all the instruments and voices into a wave that washes over the listener, reminds me very much of the overall tone of Floyd’s final studio album, the very underrated “The Division Bell.” I’m wondering if that album had an influence, consciously or not, on the evolution of Rose’s music.

“Stars,” the second song, is something very interesting. It’s the softest song on the album, but it’s something else too. There are two very different things blended together here. The best description I can offer is that it’s a lullaby with a military march behind it. Reassuring lyrics, sung with a tenderness and beauty that calms, but with a marching drumbeat punctuation occasionally running through the background as if someone is saying to the afraid and hopeless, “I will comfort you, I will promise you that it will be all right, but you must persevere. You must be strong. The pushing forward through these difficulties must come from you.” This dichotomy fascinates me. This is wonderful songwriting! And “Stars” ends using another of my favorite lyrical and vocal techniques, repeating a line in order to reinforce the point of the song, but softly. It’s a reassurance, and it works, but it's not a hammer, because too much force would upset the balance of this beautiful song.

Track 3, “Power Lines,” returns to pure rock after the lullaby of the previous song. With a strong, bright power pop feel to the instrumentation, and good lyrics with a strong hook, it makes a statement about how we’re all connected through electricity, technology, mass communication, which is something we often forget about until we enter the place the album’s title speaks of and give ourselves time to ponder what it really means to live in the modern world where we’re all connected whether we want to be or not. That’s part of the magic of this album, how the lyrics present interesting philosophical points, but never in a way that subtracts from the enjoyment of the music. “Power Lines,” with its energetic rhythm guitar work and bright sounding vocals is a fun song that also makes a definite statement about modern society.

“I Guess I Feel Okay?” is the fourth track and it rings very true. “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay,” we’ve all said over and over to ourselves and to others at some point in our lives. It’s what we do, it’s how we survive no matter how much we just want to give up and collapse sometimes. And it’s good to hear this aspect of life acknowledged in a song, because good songwriting should do just that, make us know that we’re not the only ones who feel a certain way. For that reason, this is an important song with an important message, right down to the screaming at the end. Now, what about the music? In that aspect, it’s another victory. It starts out with a gentle guitar strum, then explodes into double-tracked vocals, strong, steady drums, heavier guitars, and echoing, shimmering effects that paint a picture and pull one, yet again, into that tangible realm of sound that seems to be the signature feature of much of Rose’s work. There is a lot going on in this song. It alternates between light and heavy, bright and dark. There’s a lot going on, and all of it works. Right down to that raw, primal, echoing screaming at the end, it all works.

The next track, “The Devil That You Know,” opens with a sweet little acoustic guitar lick that comes from the place most rock music comes from. The blues! This track clearly has blues roots, though it’s not at all strictly traditional blues. I think it has a lot of ingredients. There’s a little Johnny Cash in there, and more than a little Tom Petty, especially in the great outro solo, a fierce piece of music that strongly reminds me of Mike Campbell of the Heartbreakers. But that’s not to say that there’s nothing original about the song. There certainly is! Some of the flavors are familiar, but they’ve been made into new forms by their current cook.

This is a dark song, but not depressing. Rather, it’s the important stage in the story where we recognize and name our enemy. It’s a turning point, for once we see our foe, we can find a way to overcome him. Perhaps it’s appropriate that the song that signifies this moment is the one that, more than any other on this record, contains elements from throughout the history of American music. Our guide, the songwriter, is, it seems, gathering the tools and weapons given to her by her musical predecessors as she readies herself for the next stage of her quest.

If the message of “The Devil That You Know” is that we must recognize our enemies, whether exterior or interior, I think the point of the following track, “Can’t Find Me,” goes back to the album’s main theme, as expressed in the title I’m not going to type out again, which is that we must have a refuge within if we are to triumph over the horrors of the outside world.

“Can’t Find Me” slows things down a bit again, and the lyrics tell us that our narrator is making the conscious choice now to find the center from which she must fight, and to do this she will henceforth no longer give such power to the distractions that seem to be thrown our way at every turn in this life. Musically, it’s another great song on an album full of them. Persistent drumming carries the song along at a slow but steady page, vocals well up at perfectly selected dramatic moments. Like “I Guess I Feel Okay?” this song alternates between heavy and light and ends on another repeated line accompanied by sparse instrumentation as it fades out in gentle reinforcement, which is a technique I mentioned earlier, and liked very much, in “Stars.”

The first thing I have to say about the seventh track, “Resist the Force,” is this:

I fucking love it when Rose Alaimo swears in her songs! Why? Because it doesn’t happen often and it comes across as very sincere because of its rarity. I believe I mentioned that in my review of the song, “Orchid,” too. So, yes, “Resist the Force,” opens with a rambunctious guitar and a roaring curse and tells us immediately that this is an angry song, a glorious, crunchy, fantastic angry song! The guitar work is all over the place in this one, as are the vicious vocals. It’s a work of angry art that tells you exactly what it means, but, at the same time, never goes overboard or devolves into meaningless noise. Every crunch, every cry of rage, even the feedback, must have been carefully planned. To do that, to present rage in a way that never sabotages the song, is an impressive accomplishment in songwriting.

“Between Sleep” is the eighth song, and it brings us back down after the fury of the previous track. This is, lyrically, probably the album’s darkest piece, and the desperation in the vocals demonstrates this sadly and beautifully, as do the lyrics. If you can’t feel the pain behind this song, you may not be human. This one is raw and honest and then, well, then it makes an unexpected turn at the end and we find a short piece that sounds like it could have been the seed of another song. It’s surprising, but it works. This shift is, perhaps, an admission that the sadness that is the subject of the song as a whole does have its use in life, and is an essential part of being human, as hard as that may sometimes be.

Early in this review, I mentioned the Pink Floyd album, “The Division Bell.” In that case, I was referring to the overall mood and tone of the record. Now, though, as I listen to the penultimate track, “The Dark of Light,” I’m directly reminded of the actual musical content of that underrated Floyd album. Instrumentally, this one sounds like it could have come from “The Division Bell.” Rose manages to sound, in this song, like every Floyd member of that era. There’s a Gilmouresque quality to the rhythm guitar work here, strong but not overbearing drums that remind me of the style of Nick Mason, a Richard Wright presence to the keyboards, and good bass work (for the record, David Gilmour played bass on that album, as he did on much of Floyd’s studio work). As a Floyd fan, this is a high compliment from me. Of course, it doesn’t sound exactly like Pink Floyd. To imply that would do a disservice to Rose Alaimo, who puts her own unique stamp on every track she records (and, of course, she certainly doesn’t sing with David Gilmour’s voice! That would be weird!). So, again, I wonder if I’m correct about that album having an influence on Rose’s style. I think, at least on this listen, “The Dark of Light” has my favorite bass on the album, and I’m very fond of the song as a whole, too.

The album concludes on a very positive note, with “Here I Am,” a song that starts out quietly, conversationally. The gentle opening music and vocals grow with more instruments gradually added until the sonic equivalent of a bright sunrise bursts the song open, and it is a joyful thing! Like the Beatles at their most encouraging, this song tells you that everything will most certainly be all right. It changes phases a few times, always surprisingly, but never abruptly. Clear, positive vocals weave through the entire piece, along with some of the happiest instrumental work on the record. At one point, it explodes into an absolutely joyous chorus of guest voices, which, in a brilliant songwriting move, implies to the listener, “Don’t just listen to me! Listen to US! And by believing in us, you will believe in yourself!” And, cleverly but not in a way that hits us over the head to hard, it revisits and assembles components of earlier tracks in a way that makes those familiar bits seem fresh and new and brings the whole concept album full circle to a very satisfying conclusion.

“A Place to Go When You Need to Hide,” is an extraordinary musical accomplishment. It has things in common with Rose Alaimo’s previous album, “Grow,” in that it takes songs inspired by Rose’s personal experiences and feelings and presents them in ways that allow listeners to see those things through both Rose’s words and music and the listener’s own experiences. This creates a mutual understanding, makes the statement that we’re all in the same boat as we navigate the waters of life. It’s this honest message of hope within a sometimes difficult existence, combined with masterful songwriting, vocals, and instrumental work, that makes the entire Rose Alaimo catalog a wonderful, inspiring world of songs.

You can find "A Place to Go When You Need to Hide," and Rose Alaimo's other music on