Review: Caitlin Rose, The Fleece – ‘Fantastic pop-tinged country’

About ten years ago Nashville singer songwriter, Caitlin Rose, looked as though she was destined to be the Country-Star-Most-Likely-To.

She had all of those weighty magazines that take music very seriously indeed in a right old froth. She released The Stand In and was hailed as “the future of country music”.

Acres of column inches were dedicated to her; the ordination was all set and then…nothing. The follow up album never happened. The weighty magazines moved on.

Last year she re-emerged with Cazimi, an album that shrugs off the hype and the expectation and gets back to something a bit more honest. This is the first date on her first UK tour for ages and Caitlin Rose and her four-piece band are having a blast.

Starting with Carried Away, from Cazimi, the band takes a while to shake off the road rust. They may have just toured the Stares with the Old 97s but they’re, mostly, a mighty long way from home.

A mid-tempo meander is entirely saved by Rose and her extraordinary voice. She has the ability to just kick it up an octave, to echo all of those country greats that she clearly revers. There’s a hint of Loretta Lynn, a smattering of Patsy Cline.

How Far Away gets rid of all of the cobwebs, a country rocker with a slide guitar that hints at the psychedelic. The whole thing had a decidedly spacey feel really.

Rose introduces it as a song about space but then changes her mind, decides it’s a song about Piiiiigs in Space, then asks us to tell her our favourite muppet (her’s is Scooter). This sets the tone for the rest of the evening.

Slightly odd non-sequiturs from a person that is very good company, laugh out loud moments and fantastic pop-tinged country.

The pop songs come thick and fast. Nobody’s Sweetheart has a great chorus, propulsive drums and some delicious pedal steel guitar from Chris Hillman (not that one).

The pedal steel lends it exactly the right amount if country without being overwhelming. Rose jokes that Black Obsidian took her four years to write because the rhymes were so hard to find, in fact it smoulders along, her voice easily moving from pop croon to angry shout.

Blameless, too, has a slow burn quality to it. It wears harmonised heartbreak on its sleeve, Rose as the Country innocent. She nervously twiddles her fingers, gazing off into the wastes of the Prairies.

She admits to a difficult relationship with The Stand In album, an album that threw obstacles in her way that she struggled to overcome. Perhaps as a consequence she only plays two tracks from it.

Pink Champagne is dappled with pink lights and a mirror ball. It’s the sound of the end of an evening, where the decorations hang in tatters and everyone has left you alone. On the album it teeters on the brink of pastiche, here it feels careworn and honest.

No One to Call is a proper rocking country pop tune, a massive chorus and more pedal steel. It’s just as radio-ready as it was almost ten years ago which must, surely, mean that it’s passed in to “classic” status.

Whatever difficulties Caitlin Rose has faced between her second and third albums, they haven’t dampened her infectiousness. At one stage she wonders why it was that a London journalist referred to her as “still crazy as a bucketful of frogs” although does so with a knowingly arched eyebrow.

She employs her cartoon-y “inside voice”, berates an audience member for being too funny/not funny enough, pinches a baseball cap from another (the hapless “Dave”), swears like a trooper and muses on how come it’s “so hard being the funny one”.

Funny she undoubtedly is, but she also wildly brilliant. Cheerleading her own encore, she returns for Shanghai Cigarettes, taken from her debut Own Side Now, it’s fiercely feisty, a huge, riotous feelgood hoe-down.

If Rose felt that she wasn’t going to get success on her own term back in 2013 then, maybe, the 2023 version will find exactly what she needs.

Main photo: Gavin McNamara

Read next:

• Review: Harbottle & Jonas, Downend Folk & Roots – ‘Americana-tinged and filled with yearning’
• Review: Eleven Magpies, Friendly Records – ‘A health boosting pick me up for all’
• Review: Elanor Moss, Rough Trade – ‘A set focused on her stunning vocals and mastery of the guitar’

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