Caitlin Rose – Own Side Now

Tennessean Caitlin Rose first started making waves with her debut EP Dead Flowers, recorded in 2008 but only seeing release earlier this year. It saw her bring a distinctive, brash voice to the Nashville country scene and led to her being touted as a serious talent. She hasn’t wasted time in following the EP up with a first full-length, with advance notices only adding to the amount of buzz surrounding the precocious 23-year-old.

Own Side Now is a definite change in sound and approach compared to its predecessor. The rough-and-ready, quirky style of earlier tracks like ‘Shotgun Wedding’ and ‘Gorilla Man’ has been smoothed out, replaced by slow-burning, mature, more conventionally country arrangements. While this is initially a bit disappointing, the record is rewarding when you stick with it: Rose may be taking a more subtle approach here, but her songwriting and lyrical sensibility still impress.

It’s her voice that draws you in initially: her rich, expressive vocals, equally adept at wistful down-tempo laments and rousing country-pop, have seen her compared to luminaries like Patsy Cline and Linda Ronstadt. Fortunately the material here is more than worthy of it. Opening track ‘Learnin to Ride’, for example, eases you into the album with a mellow, soothing arrangement, its lyrics ("Tennessee stud took me for a blooming bud/ He chewed me up, spit me out just the same/ He took my words, spilled my beans into the herd/ Now they all look at me with courage and disdain") illustrative of the intelligence and craft Rose brings to her compositions.

Much of the material has been around for a while and has been re-recorded: the buoyant ‘Shangai Cigarettes’, in particular, is a total re-working of its original, more sparse incarnation. ‘Spare Me’ – a “porch swing song” in her own words – rolls along deliciously with smooth guitar licks and sprightly harmonica, while ‘Own Side’ is a bruised-sounding end-of-an-affair number, wondering “Who’s going to want me when/I’m just somewhere you’ve been?”. The real highlight, though, is ‘Things Change’: written by Jordan Lehning, it’s delivered by Rose with a superb vocal performance that conveys untold levels of ache and longing. It’s enough on its own to explain the amount of adulation this young woman is receiving. Own Side Now confirms the promise of Dead Flowers: Caitlin Rose is a prodigious young talent.