Telegram Review by Victor Infante:

It’s tempting to say that Ruby Rose Fox is carving out a place for herself in rock ’n’ roll, but with her most recent album, “Salt,” that assertion is almost literal. The album — which doubles as a soundtrack to Fox’s one-woman show, which will be next staged Aug. 16 at the Museum of Science in Boston — wrestles with some of the undercurrents of iconic rock music, creating a cross-decades conversation of sorts with the nearly sacred likes of Lou Reed and the Ramones. For a lot of artists, that would be a heady-enough task, but Fox uses it as an entry point for a conversation about gender, race, politics and a corrosive consumer culture.

The album begins with “Caroline Says II,” a song that takes its title from the Reed song of the same name on his landmark 1973 album “Berlin.” Here, Fox gives a response to the original, where Reed sings, “Caroline says/as she gets up off the floor/Why is it that you beat me/it isn't any fun?” Reed’s depiction has a flatness about it, a detachment that makes the character’s implied suicide even more chilling. In her song, Fox retorts, “'Cause I was in/Lou’s Berlin/We both know Caroline ends up on the floor again/We could stand up tall/And ask for it all/The body is a body not a war memorial.”


By sinking, almost imperceptibly stepping into Reed’s narrative, she makes the song as personal as he does dispassionate. That she begins the song with a mechanically distorted voice reminiscent of one commonly used by Reed’s wife, performance artist Laurie Anderson, only adds to the sense of the song being a conversation … about Caroline, yes, but also about the way women are portrayed in songs. Fox reveals that any sense of dispassion is largely an illusion, that there are too many real Carolines for her to ever be merely an abstraction. That sense of exploring The Other rolls into the next song, “American Daddy.”

On a strictly stylistic level, this song makes great use of Fox’s striking contralto vocals, unleashing her as a straight-up soul singer, an emotive styling that lends a resonance to such desolate lyrical portraits as “I don’t know a single neighbor/but I know eight reality stars/I don’t even know who loves me/but I can recommend a couple excellent bars.”


Caroline returns in “Binghamton, NY,” a song which is both deeply personal-feeling and laden with mystery. Caroline, whom the song’s persona is addressing, is being spoken to from the present day, as revealed in lines such as, “Now my guru is a YouTube star/And I’ve never eaten wild wheat but I’m sure it was awesome/Are we really prepared for the Suicide Generation?”

That phrase “Suicide Generation” is one that might have sounded ironically cool in an earlier era, but in a distinctly contemporary context — one where cyberbullying factors into an alarming number of teen suicides. Fox connects the dots — the abuse Caroline suffers, the internet, a generation for whom suicide is becoming alarmingly common — with a light hand, so subtly you can almost miss that she’s done it. There’s a moral and political perspective in the album, but it’s not didactic, and sometimes, when she hits with an extraordinarily personal line — “Turns out I’m not a mother/Not sure how I feel about that” — the result is a small catch in the throat. Everything is always personal, even — especially — when it’s political.


It’s that closeness that makes the baldly political “Charlottesville,” where Fox turns her eye toward the Tiki torch-wielding white supremacist rally that ended with the death of a woman. Fox views the horror through a variety of lenses, particularly Ramones songs, where she quotes their song “The KKK Took My Baby Away,” upending the original song’s flip irreverence and turning it into something devastating. Curiously, the song is addressed to “Leonard,” whom one presumes is an oblique reference to the late singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, whose song “Democracy” is referenced later in the album. Certainly, the distance between Cohen’s “democracy is coming to the USA” seems almost quaint in the face of the twisted mockery racism makes of freedom of speech.

This is also a point where Fox uses the tool of imposing commercial imagery into her indelibly human subjects, causing a sort of cognitive dissonance. “Baptize me in Pepsi,” she sings, “and tell me that I’ve sinned.”


In some ways, the heartache-filled love song “Matador,” with its slow-burn yearning and snap of castanets, is a bit of a respite. The song resonates with loss and washes slowly over the listener. It’s a simple-enough story, but even here, Fox subverts roles and tropes. The suggestion of a paso doble narrative gives way at the end to the realization that they are no longer what they were: “I’m not a Bull anymore/and you’re no longer a Matador.”

The tone changes completely with the fight anthem “Lady Godiva,” and whereas most forget that the reason the Countess of Mercia rode naked through Coventry was to protest her husband’s oppression of the commoners, Fox clearly hasn’t. There is no vulnerability here. Indeed, the refrain of the word “unconquerable” is deeply stirring, and when she sings “I keep losing and coming back, broken and beautiful,” it’s hard to not be struck by the persona’s undefeatable spirit.

As the album enters its final triptych, Fox fuses all of her elements into the unnerving “Your Sister Is Dead. I’m Buying A Sega,” where the jarring commercial placement rattles against the song’s inherent sense of absence: “our tiny, tiny, Gypsy gone to Graceland/You were too good for our cruel little town/Hope you tell Elvis Presley/We never let you, we never let you down.” There’s an emptiness in that thought, a sense that it’s a lie. Indeed, there is a refraining sense that we consistently let each other down echoing throughout the entire album, and that those failures are costly, and heartbreaking.


“Christopher, I’m coming home without you,” sings Fox, in a song named for that lyric. “You and your bloody shirt, your whiskey and your fear.”

The album concludes with “Boy Wonder, Come To Me To Survive The Internet Bully,” a love song of sorts that shines a light on the loneliness of modern life: “I got to dinner with the TV on/My headphones and my things to do/Am I afraid, no not at all/Keeps me from feeling you.”

It’s a bittersweet ending, one with a sense of disintegration and alienation that haunts everything, and yet amid it all, it’s still the urge for love and a sense of human connection that burns brightest, the thing that survives when all this culture toxicity has rotted everything else away.