CAZIMI by Caitlin Rose
Caitlin Rose’s first two albums, 2011’s Own Side Now and 2013’s The Stand-In, proved that she deserved the special attention she was getting in the parts of the Nashville music scene that weren’t trying to find the next Shania Twain or Carrie Underwood. She didn’t quite disappear after the second album, but she did take to the shadows, making CAZIMI feel and sound like a reemergence.
It’s not melodramatic: the opener, “Carried Away,” hints at influences from two of the most tuneful Velvet Underground songs—the rhythmic groove of “Sweet Jane” and the pretty bells of “Stephanie Says”—and Rose’s vocal volume does not rise above an intelligible murmur.
Throughout the album, Rose and Jordan Lehning’s co-production is sharp enough to let every drumbeat and organ fill be heard, but at the same time gauzy enough to avoid the overly crisp and clean tendencies of digital technology that can turn organic emotions into the audio equivalent of HDTV color saturation.
Because the production isn’t bound to this very moment, the dozen songs neither reflect the long gap between Rose’s second and third albums nor indicate how CAZIMI was delayed a couple more years by the pandemic.
Instead, they embody her continued unwillingness to settle on any particular subgenre signatures: “Nobody’s Sweetheart” has the urban twang of Summerteeth-era Wilco, “Black Obsidian” suggests Kacey Musgraves backed by Golden Smog, and “Blameless” blends the pleasurable wooziness of Cowboy Junkies with a honky-tonk hurt as old as any Patsy Cline lament.
Her collaborators besides Lehning share her sense of the old impulses inside modern existence, and one of them, singer-songwriter Courtney Marie Andrews, is particularly simpatico as a co-writer and singer on “Getting It Right,” a neatly catchy track that summarizes both Caitlin Rose’s music and the woman herself as works in progress.
