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Ritter and Rouse make the grade
BY JONATHAN PERRY
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If quiet is the new loud, as the Kings of Convenience have proclaimed, then Josh Ritter and Josh Rouse, a pair of singer-songwriters who specialize in painting low-key portraits of people negotiating the emotional land mines of love and distressed circumstance, should be poised to make a deafening roar. The Idaho-born 26-year-old Ritter, who now lives in Somerville, is more the newcomer of the two, but thanks to steady touring, both he and the 31-year-old Rouse, a native Nebraskan transplanted to Nashville, have built comparable critical buzzes to go with loyal audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Both also have new albums out that, though very different from each other in terms of production, share similar subject matter: ordinary folks living out narrowly demarcated lives who are trying to break free of those limits. The material on each artist’s country-folk-tinged debut — Rouse’s pastoral Dressed Up like Nebraska (Rykodisc, 1998), Ritter’s similarly rustic Golden Age of Radio (Signature Sounds, 2002) — was laced with an air of rootbound restlessness and wrapped in intimate, modest production that brought the singer’s conversational voice close to the listener’s ear. And on their new discs — Ritter’s Hello Starling (Signature Sounds), Rouse’s 1972 (Rykodisc) — both men play the suitor standing in the shadows pining for a would-be lover and pondering their next move. Ritter’s "Kathleen" and "Snow Is Gone" and Rouse’s "Comeback (Light Therapy)" and "Rise" exude a frustrated euphoria tempered with the humility that comes from knowing something or someone may still, for the moment, be just out of reach. Both Hello Starling and 1972 aim high for a kind of classic pop timelessness, but their authors take opposite tacks in getting there. The spare, burnished acoustic arrangements that frame the evocative songs on Hello Starling seem unfettered by trends. It’s traditional yet ageless music that, gilded by the dreamlike delicacy of Ritter’s lyrics, sounds as if it could have been made any time during the past 40 years. Ritter recorded mostly live with his crack band and in a converted old dairy barn in France, and the album feels less like nostalgia than a subtly powerful work for the ages. Whereas everything about 1972 — the smooth Gamble and Huff/Philly soul-style production sheen (the disc was actually recorded at Rouse’s home studio in Nashville); self-consciously groovy track titles like "Love Vibration" and "Sunshine (Come On Lady)"; the Tiger Beat cover graphics — is calculated to speak to the era the album title evokes. Well, the soft and fuzzy parts anyway. 1972 (the year Rouse was born) is more about channeling Bread than singing about the bombs still dropping in Vietnam. Despite occasionally stilted lyrics and quaint self-help banalities (the opening verse of "Love Vibration" goes, "Step out into the sun/Step out into the world and love someone/Save yourself from hate/ Save yourself from hate and all the hassle"), Rouse has generally good material. The affecting title track is a lilting sketch about lives adrift that’s carried aloft by piano, strings, vibraphone, and his laconic vocal. He nails the cool blue-eyed neo-soul of "Come Back (Light Therapy)," which features flute, sax, and a nifty "Miss You" bass line opening and break. "Flight Attendant" is a troubled, touching portrait of a gay man who’s endured a childhood of taunts, all the while dreaming that "one day I’ll fly free, in the airplanes." Hello Starling, on the other hand, marks the maturation of an artist who even on Radio sounded wise beyond his years. Holding court before a full house at his Paradise CD-release party two weeks back, Ritter showed easygoing charm and an ingrained sense of personal modesty that made for a compelling contrast to the self-assurance and sophistication of his new work. And the wide, almost disbelieving grin that registered on his face again and again as he sang gave the impression that he too was reveling in his own discovery of this new music. Although Ritter has said that he’d like to distance himself from the ceaseless comparisons to people named Drake and Dylan, Starling will do little to stop people from naming names. Indeed, the tangled-up-in-blue wordplay and sardonic posturing of "You Don’t Make It Easy Babe" seems strangely masochistic in its evocation of the old man from Duluth. What’s more, one of Ritter’s new compositions, the magnificent, poetic "Wings," has just been covered by Joan Baez for her new album. So for the time being, the comparisons to Bob will continue. But hey, it could be worse. They could be to Jakob. Josh Rouse plays the Paradise, 967 Commonwealth Avenue, on Saturday October 18; call (617) 423-NEXT.
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