Music Millennium

Reviews:

osh Rouse named his latest album for the year of his birth, the year of his Telecaster's manufacture and the year of music that has had the most profound effect on his creative sensibilities. Though he's been tagged as a folksy Nick Drake sparsemeister (not a comparison that he'd disavow), Rouse shows a more fully realized side of his rootsy persona here, revealing an abiding love of pop, soul and gospel. And he frames his tremulously warbled tales of '70s love both right and wrong-his best explorations of sexual tension and emotional dysfunction to date-with his musical obsessions: everyone from Carole King ("Slaveship," the title track) and Neil Young ("Sparrows Over Birmingham") to Marvin Gaye ("Love Vibration") and Al Green ("Come Back [Light Therapy]").

Brad Jones' full-bore production, complete with swelling, swinging Burt Bacharach orchestrations and period instrumentation, is the perfect foil for Rouse's forward-into-the-past concept. Like contemporaries My Morning Jacket, Rouse's evocation of the early '70s sound is equally informed by his stated love of the Smiths and the Cure, which gives 1972 a vibe steeped in a deep respect for the past and a divine understanding of the present, the perfect equation for classicism and longevity. As Rouse says in "Rise," "It's an honest thing and honest things they last."