When: 25th August 2010
Reviewed by: Abbas Ali
With the release of her debut album just over a week earlier, Caitlin Rose is finding life in the limelight a brand new challenge. The precocious 23 year old recorded her first EP, Dead Flowers, while still in her teens, though it was released just last year. In that short time, she has been tipped by the UK media as "one to watch", and so the question is, does her new material and performance live up to the expectations and promise of her rough-round-the-edges earlier work?
The room of 200 or so people fall almost completely silent as she hits the stage and opens with the first track from the album, ‘Learning To Ride’. The song illustrates perfectly the battles of being young and trying to find a place in the world, with its refrain "I get knocked down / when I’m learning to ride." Rose’s fragility is visible on stage. "I’m nervous", she says, "There are so many of you", while pausing for a breather in front of the silent, hypnotised audience, reading their quietness as English reserve.
Accompanied by just two backing musicians, Jordan Caress on bass and Jeremy Fetzer on guitar, Rose continues with the album’s title track, and highlight, ‘Own Side Now’, which displays her knack for classic, mature songwriting, as well as displaying her debt to her hero, Linda Ronstadt. Recent years in this country have seen the emergence of female singers with belting, gravelled female voices like Amy Winehouse and Adele, but the Nashville singer shows the merits of her sweet, melodic voice without sacrificing any power or expression.
Gradually, as singer and audience become acquainted, Rose relaxes, joking about Weird Al Yankovic, Larry David, telling us about her favourite records. Her warmth and goofy humour is at odds with the earnest music, providing a contrast with her musical stories of heartbreak. Tonight, it seems, all human life is here. The audience open up, replying to her friendly questions about where people are from, and laughing at her tales of her guitarist being caught underage, drinking on local TV, and their touring antics in recent days.
Rose’s energetic personality soon wins the audience over, and after a instrument swap, she progresses to the Linda Ronstadt number, ‘He Darked The Sun’ before the failing relationship of ‘For The Rabbits’, a timeless song which could have been as easily recorded in the 70s as it could last year.
By the end the previously reserved audience is sufficiently relaxed to have fun, if not quite for the good ol’ fashioned Nashville hoedown to which Rose is accustomed back home in the guitar bars of East Nashville. Her earlier, more rebellious, fun and less polished work makes an appearance, and the crowd accompany her on her very own drinking song, ‘Answer In One Of These Bottles’. The versatile songstress follows without her fellow musicians on her own protest song ‘Docket’, which includes the immortal lines "the surgeon general can suck on my dick". Finally, going from youthful rebellion to simian love, she sings ’Gorilla Man’, accompanied only by her tambourine.
The female singer songwriter arena may indeed by a crowded marketplace in the UK these days, but with her knack for classic song writing, warm persona and sense of fun, Rose may join Lissie as a vintage Americana artist from the heart of the US that wins the hearts of many music fans here in the UK.
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