Nashville-based Josh Rouse is not one to bare his soul. "People often ask me what this or that song means," he mutters, before stepping into Dressed Up Like Nebraska. "Dunno. I make it up." Such a seemingly casual approach is both disingenuous and true.
His small-town vignettes are populated with flawed, elegiac characters, unquestioning of their lot but quietly battered emotionally. His latest album, Under Cold Blue Stars, is a concept of sorts: the saga of an incompatible couple and their pain and redemption. Of course, this delicate notion is rather lost in the Dingwalls murk, and Rouse will certainly not elaborate. As the old chestnut goes, the music must speak for itself. And speak it does - most eloquently.
Rouse, so emotionally frigid it takes 20 minutes for him to unzip his bomber jacket and another 10 to shed the thing, makes music where the melodies are sunny but swept by the chilliest of lyrical winds. The effect is both warming and disconcerting, and it marks Rouse as something special. Hence Directions and Feeling No Pain sweep along as if propelled by the ghosts of Ian Broudie and Karl Wallinger, but - not unlike Broudie himself - the lyrics are contorted with the guilt and doubt of the truly troubled. For one so inexpressive he makes a convincing rocker, and a similarly credible goth if a brief version of the Cure's A Forest is any yardstick.
Even so, Rouse truly shines when the pace slackens. Although he might have done better to play it solo (as he does Nothing Gives Me Pleasure), The Whole Night Through is only slightly diminished by an overbearing militaristic drumbeat. This short, regret-encrusted deathbed confession is Rouse's most complete song and he delivers it with such warmth that everyone forgives his grumpy demeanour. "Made up" or not, it's desperately moving.
Another cover, the Kinks' Well Respected Man, works less well, but Rouse has three albums of his own material to cherry-pick. Laughter's irresistible chorus marks him out as a pop man, Women and Men as an admirable chronicler of sexual jostling and Hey Porcupine as a man with more self-awareness than he lets slip. He is well on his way.
