Josh Rouse

Josh Rouse 1972 Rykodisc www.joshrouse.com

Mosh Rouse slides away from easy comparisons today’s demographic culture requires. He manifests some of the shyness of Nick Drake; he sings with some of the grainy charm of Paul Westerberg; he can move with the quiet heard in late-period Yo La Tengo; and he reveals his romantic side in the shy, sly manner of many other modern singer/songwriters.

Yet everything he’s done since his 1998 debut Dressed Up Like Nebraska has stepped around facile similarities, and with his fourth full-length album the step turns into a confident stride. 1972, the year Rouse was born, and the year he constantly evokes here, as if he remembered and assimilated everything he heard on the radio while he was learning to speak and walk.

Instead of merely regurgitating those memories—not hard to do, as demonstrated by every guitar-toting hustler who owns a couple Beck records—Rouse frames them in the current century. The flute, the backing vocals, the walking bass line of “Comeback (Light Therapy)” or the soul strings of “James” should carry the mustiness of leisure suits left too long in storage, but Rouse wields the old signifiers with respect instead of reverence.

The signifiers respond openly and fully, so that songs like the blushing, lovesexy “Under Your Charms” and the carnival-ride “Slaveship” come as new messages from a past with which no one is finished. Least of all Rouse, who once again manages a kind of individuality within the swirl of the tantalizingly familiar.