I have a friend who goes to antique malls just to look at old postcards. They're usually stuffed into decrepit wooden boxes, sitting out on top of glass cases holding highly priced tiny items - postwar Japanese porcelain figurines, Dwight Eisenhower campaign buttons, men's ties whose striped fronts disguise bawdy burlesque pictures on the back. Back when we were dating, we'd go to these places together - take little one-day vacations to quintessentially Midwestern towns with names like Hebron and Columbus and Woodstock and Milton, and we'd sample the stale, mildewy air of their little antique shops like discriminating wine-tasters: this one has a dry oaky flavor with chintzy overtones and a harsh, dusty aftertaste. And he'd find those little boxes of postcards - sometimes they'd be there in clusters - and I'd go off in search of 78s. And sometimes we'd find wonderful things - like a postcard that one of the Chordettes sent back home to Sheboygan - or a scratchy-but-playable 78 record of a song called "Lena, the Queen o' the Uptown Arena" (about a female wrestler!).
Hearing Subtitulo, the latest (sixth full-length) album from singer-songwriter Josh Rouse takes me back to those one-day vacations bumming around antique stores on those little hundred-year-old main streets - the way a steep set of creaky stairs leads you down through almost claustrophobic passages to floors below, cubed off in little booths, labyrinthine and endless in their layouts, and loaded with dusty old stuff. The album is airy and nostalgic, and wistful in a way that is both as intimate as postcard-browsing with your best friend, and as grand as a 1950's cinemascope close-up of some forgotten film ingenue. Recorded in Puerto de Santa Maria in Spain (where Rouse has lived recently), the songs have a vintage vacation-at-the-beach feel to them - simple, folksy, just-a-guy-and-his-guitar arrangements set against sparkly summer sunset backdrops. As light as a song like "Jersey Clowns" may feel, there's a fullness, a lushness to it - musically, lyrically and emotionally - that keeps it from blowing away on the slightest sea breeze.
Josh Rouse has a cinematographer's ear. He is a master at creating atmosphere and establishing setting with his songs, but unlike much of what we might call "atmospheric", Rouse's songs really are songs. They have real, stick-in-your-head melodies, and they tell literate short stories about complex, believable characters - and, like all the daily rituals of the people of Grover's Corners that make the town what it is, these songs, especially over the course of repeated listens (and at just over a half hour, the record is conducive to repeated listens), form a sort of mosaic picture of the little world he's created here.
He did this best on his 2001 album Under Cold Blue Stars, but Subtitulo may be that record's equal in both coherence and cumulative emotional weight. And the fact that Rouse and his longtime producer Brad Jones favor impeccably detail-oriented production lends even his simpler numbers - songs like the lead single "Quiet Town", the instrumental "La Costa Blanca", his Brazilian-inflected duet with Paz Suay (who also did the cover art) "The Man Who Doesn't Know How to Smile" and the closing "El Otro Lado" - a finely wrought theatrical beauty. Much as Thornton Wilder lets his audience fill in the scenery with their imaginations in his play Our Town, Rouse fills in only the most necessary blanks, establishing an emotional arc over the course of the disc, but still allowing the listener to bring their own experiences into the story. As such, more than just about any other artist out there right now, Josh Rouse creates catchy, even stylish pop songs (check those Steely Dan electric piano grooves on "His Majesty Rides") while warmly inviting us to develop deep, lasting personal relationships with his records.
With Subtitulo, he's sent us a postcard from Spain. Just a postcard, sure. A simple, even common thing, maybe, but it comes from a big, exotic place, and it's full of stories only hinted at with the hastily "Wish You Were Here" greetings - stories we can only speculate about. But that speculation is a joy, and like that one postcard from one of the Chordettes, these songs are the kinds of treasures that keep us coming back to Josh Rouse's little musical antique mall for little half-hour vacations.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Subtitulo" by Josh Rouse
Bedroom Classics / Nettwerk Records
Released 3/21/06
Produced by Brad Jones
34 min.
SONGS: Quiet Town - Summertime - It Looks Like Love - La Costa Blanca - Jersey Clowns - His Majesty Rides - Givin' It Up - Wonderful - The Man Who Doesn't Know How to Smile - El Otro Lado
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