by Ljubinko Zivkovic (@zivljub)
When you go lo-fi, there's two reasons for it. You consciously go for that sound, or, simply, that is the only possibility left to you to get your music out. Deja Carr aka Mal Devisa obviously recorded most of 12pm Rosewater in the lo-fi mode because that was the mode available at the moment. As she points out in the liner notes, she wanted to keep up with the tradition of releasing some very personal music at her birthday.
"My goal throughout the first 8 years of Mal Devisa other than to get signed to a label like Stones Throw or Def Jam was to buy a house, I wasn't able to do any of those things due to poor organizational infrastructure but I did accomplish a lot. I've saved lives, and changed lives and in the process gotten very scraped up. I no longer have the same relationship with my family as I once did because I chose the music over the noise."
While you can obviously hear the sound of a dorm or a similar confining space where most of these songs were recorded, you can fully catch the personal sense of meaning in these songs, all of them relying on Carr's bass and incredible voice that filters through the recording confinements.
Yet it is on the tracks which seem to be recorded in a more proper studio setting like “Slept On” and “My Potential” that you can really feel exactly what the title of the latter song says - Mal Devisa's really incredible potential, both in her songwriting and even more so with her vocal capabilities. 12pm Rosewater really makes you think how incredible these songs would sound like fully blown.