Josh Rouse - 1972

The softer side of the "Me" decade is running rampant in the Forest. The aging, macrobiotic, yoga-stretching inhabitants are waving their freak flags of mellowness. Strum on!

Josh Rouse is a fine singer songwriter. A couple of years back he hit the same phase our contributers have and produced this completely irony-free homage to that time and its music. It's gorgeous and was on regular rotation for me for a long time after its release. I sent it to the Curry yesterday to feed his habit (he'd never heard it) and found myself luxuriating in its beauty once again.

Though the music is pitch perfect, finding its foundation in the stylings of that era, its content is sometimes darker and often more intelligent than the standard fare upon which it's based.

No other artist has mined the 70's soft rock material so well without hedging his bet with the all too common smirk or the annoyingly requisite wink.

This really is a great record.

amg:

Josh Rouse's 1972 gives away the game in the first line of the first song, the exquisite title track, when he name-checks Carole King. The record is going back in time and it is going to have fun doing it. Rouse's records have always been highly literate and highly musical, but they have never been fun like this, and make no mistake, 1972 is a fun record. Rouse sounds as loose as a goose and the songs reflect that. Not always lyrically, as some of the songs touch on such non-fun subjects as loneliness, repression, and bitterness, but definitely musically. To that end, Brad Jones' production is spot-on perfect — not an instrument is out of place and the whole record has a jaunty bounce and a lush dreaminess. 1972 is coated with sonic goodness: fluttering strings, piping horns, cotton-candy sweet flutes, funky percussion, handclaps, and great backing vocals. Rouse and Jones find inspiration in all the right places: in the laid-back groove of Al Green, the California haze of Fleetwood Mac, the dreamy melancholia of Nick Drake, the sexy groove of Marvin Gaye, and the wordy lilt of Jackson Browne or James Taylor. The songs are the strongest batch Rouse has written yet. "Love Vibration" is the hit single; it has everything a hit single needs: musical hooks, lyrical hooks, vocal hooks, a smoldering sax solo (optional), and a groovy video. Other songs that are sure to be in heavy rotation are "James," a funky ballad that shows off Rouse's wonderful falsetto (as does "Comeback [Light Therapy]") and takes time for that most elusive creature, a good flute solo; "Under Your Charms," a sultry, sensual ballad that takes a potentially squirm-inducing subject and actually does it right, Marvin-style; and "Rise," a beautifully orchestrated epic that ends the record on a perfect note. 1972 should vault Rouse to the forefront of intelligent pop alongside kindred spirits like Joe Pernice and Kurt Wagner (of Lambchop). If you say you've heard a better pop record this year, you are lying.


And to my fellow Forest posters, most of whom are younger than I by a decade or so and have perhaps fewer memories of the original ride, these lyrics from the title track might speak to your current obsession:

We're going through some changes
hopin' for replacement
until we find,
a way out of this hole

Hear

Here's a nice stripped-down acoustic performance of Love Vibration.