Josh Rouse
Nashville
(Ryko)
Nashville has all the makings of a terrible album. Rouse’s voice is reminiscent of Ryan Adams’, his alt-country owes to the bastardized Nashville sound that nearly killed the genre and his lyrics have a boringly upper-middle-class slant. Yet Rouse makes this recipe for faux-urban hayseed garbage work. His writing is charming and relaxed rather than inventive and im-mediate. Nashville succeeds in its unity: The songs build from each other, making the track list as dynamic as the individual tracks.
—Matt Charlton
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2007.