Josh Rouse
1972

THE REVIEW

Casual encounters often end up being the most fruitful; they usually give me even greater satisfaction than those actively sought after. This album is no exception, having come into my hands in a haphazard way and becoming, without a doubt, one of my favorites of the last two years.

I confess to not knowing the previous work of Josh Rouse, an American singer-songwriter from Nashville, whom I am told tends towards the melancholy and has at least one remarkable album, "Home". However, this work captivated me from the first listen. Ten songs, ten of refined, imaginative, inspired singer-songwriter music in the vein of James Taylor, Jackson Browne, Eric Andersen, and the list could go on, enriched by numerous references to other music from that era (Al Green, the "Philly sound," Steely Dan, even a bit of "Disco").
1972 is the artist's birth year, so the musical memories must not all be firsthand. But the "miracle" of the album is that it makes you relive the seventies' atmospheres, immersing you in that controversial period without dripping with nostalgia, a noble sentiment but only in homeopathic doses. The instrumentation is decidedly vintage with sax, Wurlitzer, vibraphones, but used with rigor and never yielding to philological temptation.

An album without a drop in tone; tracks held together by the underlying idea, pop-inspired, yet different in style; the impression is as if each of them refers to one of the songs Josh listened to on the radio as a child, suddenly resurfaced to assert their influence.
From this sort of psychoanalytic session emerges the portrait of a regenerated artist, in a state of grace, who looks to those roots to reconstruct, relying on both imagination and memory, his story, which is also that of an entire generation.