Someone dipped his madeleine deep into the tea. “Some things, they can take you right back,” sings Mon Rovîa at the beginning of BLOODLINE – and then dives into his past, which begins in Liberia, after whose capital Monrovia the musician, whose real name is Janjay Lowe, named himself. During the Civil War he is adopted by Christian missionaries who move the child back to the USA, raise him in a strict religious manner and cut him off from his history.
Today he lives in Tennessee – and explores his roots on trips to Liberia and through his music. He has already worked on this in a series of four long EPs, and is now continuing this task on his debut album. “I remember it like it was yesterday,” he sings in “Day At The Soccer Fields” – recalling the daily horror of a life full of war, displacement, loss.
Mon Rovîa laboriously digs through trauma and buried memories: “Where’s the rest of my mind?” he asks in “Running Boy”. However, this work of remembrance comes across as musically light-footed, a shadowy melancholy settles on the always catchy melodies, which sail rather carefree and sometimes even close to kitsch over a mostly acoustic folk accompaniment. Only occasionally do echoes of his West African homeland appear. A melody here, a rhythm there, they fall like crumbs from the madeleine.
This review appears in Musikexpress 2/2026.