Whittle me till I’m little me
Back to banyan trees, cassava leaves
War-torn screams, Maria
Birthing me in a black cauldron

So begins Mon Rovîa’s debut album Bloodline. The title of the opening song (“Black Cauldron”) calls to mind Disney’s 1985 film of the same name, in which the titular cauldron is used to create an undead army. In Mon Rovîa’s song, the civil war that erupted in his native Liberia is equipped with the same dark power, placing rifles in the hands of child soldiers, whom Mon Rovîa sings of one verse later. Although his own fight is merely for survival, his undead nature as a child—“Cauldron-born” amid such adversity—is revealed in the line: “Mama, tell me there’s a reason for living,” his gentle vocals suggesting a self-restraint learned only by bearing witness to the horrors of unbridled extremism. The slightly disjointed melody reflects the instability of a violent childhood, and the song culminates in a layering of the plea to his mother for meaning—to bind together a fractured world and a fractured identity.         

Born Janjay Lowe, Mon Rovîa chose his stage name—a stylized version of Liberia’s capital city—as a tribute to his homeland, which he left at the age of seven after losing his mother and being adopted by American missionaries. The remainder of his childhood was characterized by his adoptive family’s Christian faith, which centered around church and mission-driven travel, from Florida to the Bahamas and eventually Tennessee, where he first encountered the folk music that would shape his own Afro-Appalachian twist on the genre. Citing Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and Mumford & Sons as influences, he admits an attraction to religious allegory informed by his evangelical upbringing.

This attraction is readily apparent in “Pray the Devil back to Hell,” which opens with a news clip describing the city of Monrovia’s “[dissolution] into chaos” and the withdrawal of peacekeepers and aid agencies from the area. The void left behind was filled, however, by a group of women, Muslim and Christian alike (“dressed all in white . . . love knows no sides”), who gathered to pray, sing, and mobilize for an end to the war. Inspired by a documentary of the same name, the song opens with a shimmer of strummed strings that feels like dappled sunlight underpinned by an oceanic pulse, aurally orienting the listener in the fish market in Liberia’s coastal capital, where these women first gathered to lift up their prayers and songs for peace, successfully concluding 14 years of bloodshed after their numbers grew to 3,000.

Released just two days after the killing of Renee Nicole Good, Bloodline comes to us in the midst of America’s own period of state-sanctioned violence and political upheaval. The streets of Minneapolis remain a far cry from war-ravaged Liberia, but as Mon Rovîa sings against the backdrop of an apprehensive violin and steady guitar in “Day at the soccer fields,” “I see resemblance, scorn / We are far from home.” In “Heavy Foot,” easily the most popular song on the album, he calls upon us to meet the moment with glad-hearted resistance, borrowing the foot-stomping, hand-clapping percussion of a hoedown and words from Audre Lorde’s poem “A Litany for Survival” to do so. He addresses a variety of social ills, school shootings and homelessness among them, but the prison-industrial complex—or “the new Jim Crow”—receives particularly pointed attention, being raised as a subject not only in “Heavy Foot” but also in “Running Boy.”

A prison of a different sort comes under the lens in “Old Fort Steel Trail.” Here, in one of Bloodline’s more satisfying wordplays, Mon Rovîa asks whether what we make of our past is a matter of perspective (“Is this a prison in my mind? / Or does a prism just need light?”). While the answer to that question may well be yes, in “Somewhere down in Georgia,” he denies the possibility of burying the past (“Old ghosts still walk along / cotton fields turned parking lots / Steel and stone can’t hide these stains / History still grows in the cracks when it rains”), claiming that even asphalt cannot hide our nation’s faults before moving to a bridge whose layered, high-pitched vocals would be right at home on Bon Iver’s eponymous 2011 album. (In this writer’s humble opinion, this is the most stirring song on the album.) 

Mon Rovîa undoubtedly has room to grow as an artist—as well he should, especially this early in his career. The lengthiest of Bloodline’s 16 tracks ends at just three-and-a-half minutes. To be fair, it’s more enjoyable to be left wanting more than to approach annoyment at a song’s length, but Mon Rovîa could stand to be bolder, as several of his songs would benefit from either lyrical or instrumental elaboration. The album’s namesake song suffers from this shortcoming, with its lyrics offering little meat to chew on, but the song’s power lies in suggestion. It nods thematically to the inescapability of the generations that came before us—the effect that is inextricably linked to its cause—and the song’s plaintive tone, paired with a closing Whatsapp message from the sister with whom Mon Rovîa recently reconnected, insists on an emotional resonance belied by the lyrics’ scant substance. “Little by Little” is unsatisfying as well, though for different reasons, the culprit in this case being a weak marriage of melody and rhyming scheme.

There is a detectable cynicism in Bloodline (see “Black Cauldron” and “Pray the Devil back to Hell”), though given everything Mon Rovîa has seen and experienced, that cynicism is perhaps better described in his own words, as  “hidden grief and, at times, deep blue pain.” But it is clear that Mon Rovîa is naturally inclined toward optimism, with “Heavy Foot,” “Oh Wide World,” and “Infinite Pines” standing out as the hopeful heart of the album. (The lyrics of “Infinite Pines” could be the same prayer lifted up by the Liberian women featured in “Pray the Devil back to Hell”: “There’s a change that’s coming like veins keep running our blood / Though the lights keep fading, there’s a peace that’s waiting for us . . . Amen / Amen / Amen / Amen.”)  

Bloodline isn’t an album that grips you; Mon Rovîa appears to be uninterested in adopting such a forceful attitude toward his audience. Instead, he holds you in an open palm, wraps you in a warm voice, and invites you to stay there—to reflect, to cry, to dance. In the swirl of moving melodies and powerful lyrics, it’s easy to forget that we could just as easily live in a world without Mon Rovîa, given how entangled his early life was with death. I think I speak for many of us when I echo his words from “Where the mountain meets the sea” back to him:

And I can say this with absolute joy, that I am so happy
Truly, to exist the same time as you
Man, what a time