Mosley Wotta insists ‘This is (Not) All There Is’

Published 12:15 am Thursday, January 30, 2020

After a seven-year gap between 2012’s “KinKonK” and last year’s “What Comes After,” Mosley Wotta quickens his release pace with the seven-song “This is (Not) All There Is,” set to drop Feb. 2. At first, it might be tempting to consider the record the flipside to “What Comes After,” but while the two albums share thematic similarities, sonically they stand very much apart.

This is apparent from the opening two tracks, “Just Like Them” and “Nigh at the Museum,” which was recently released as a video shot at the High Desert Museum. Producer/guitarist Colten Tyler Williams (aka Collothen) trades the heavy, angular beats found on much of “What Comes After” for spacey soundscapes — “Nigh at the Museum” borders on jazzy — while Wotta delivers melodic hooks that seep into his flow. This suits the lyrics, particularly the encouraging verses of “Museum”: “If you’re feeling slighted or divided, hardly visible, know to us you matter and your presence (is) indispensable.”

The beats hit harder as the EP progresses. Wotta keeps the melodic verses going on “Not Me,” a defiant, challenging statement of purpose (“Tell me what I cannot be … I’m gonna do it anyway”). “Rusty Can” and “Killy Holiday (Anita Cut)” meld personal and political, with the former sounding like an outgrowth of the Middle Eastern influences Williams employed on the “7 Hills” soundtrack.

Wotta’s lyrics are typically nuanced and gray, taking to task artificial divisions such as Republican or Democrat while tackling gentrification and loss of individualism (“Just Like Them”) or racism and social strife (“Killy Holiday (Anita Cut)”). But as he states on closing track “Astir,” “Don’t mistake my kind for a coward with a valiant tongue who spouts clichés and rhetoric and ‘Why can’t we all get along?’”

— Brian McElhiney, The Bulletin