Josh Rouse: 1972 : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

A literate folky who never fit in with the western-shirt crowd, Josh Rouse indulges a Dusty in Memphis fetish on his fifth album, 1972, a collection of white soul nuggets that yearn for a return to AM radio days in the year of his birth. Digging such a strip-mined era is, at best, dicey. Paisley-drenched pop nuggets like "Love Vibration," find Rouse floating above "I Love the Seventies" corniness with the help of a solid backing band and alluringly simple lyrics out of an 8-track daydream ("Step out into the sun/Step out into the world and love someone"). Santana-like Afro-Cuban beats, falsetto vocals and flute trills, turn "James" into the lost soundtrack to a chase scene in a cop flick. The album's aim is not just fuzzy nostalgia, though. "Sparrows Over Birmingham" and "Flight Attendant" tell sprightly and unexpectedly poignant stories of lives lived in the margins: by, respectively, a paraplegic Mexican girl who weds a preacher and a bitter, repressed gay airline steward. Rouse proves with 1972 that going backwards doesn't always mean losing ground.

GIL KAUFMAN
(September 16, 2003)