In case you didn’t guess from the old-fashioned glamor on the cover of Caitlin Rose’s third album, its first song makes plain that the Nashville singer-songwriter has some quibbles with the modern age. “So long ago my radio heart got broken/ Now the songs I wanna hear, they never play,” the 25-year old laments on “No One to Call”, which starts with a rock flourish, then sways through a smart Americana tumble of pedal steel and buoyant twangs, like a luxury Richmond Fontaine. Of course, radio stations are fickle by nature, which is what makes them such an enduring lyrical metaphor. The Stand-In is a gorgeous-sounding chronicle of such archetypal props, characters, and sounds, though the conceit does occasionally smother their narrator’s natural, vital wit.
The Stand-In was written in Rose’s living room, where she would get drunk with her two best friends and write songs for characters, underpinned by a streak of personal experience. Warring couples, wallflowers, mismatched just-marrieds, the haunted heartbroken, and fading stars all crop up, united by their mistrust in appearances, awareness of how we can bring out the worst in one another, and a life of lowered expectations. There’s a sneaky, killer couplet at the end of “Pink Champagne”, all softly weeping pedal steel and somberly stepping bass drum, where, some time after a Vegas wedding that they knew was a bad idea even then, the groom wearily observes, “Never will forget the day you turned and said to me/ ‘Darlin’, it was just as lovely as I dreamed that it could be.’”
That slightly passive mode of dejection lingers over parts of The Stand-In, though. Caitlin Rose is witty, brilliant company in interviews and on-stage, and songs like “Shanghai Cigarettes” from 2010’s Own Side Now amply proved that her charming voice can carry all those qualities musically, too. Rose started out playing warehouse punk shows alongside bands like JEFF the Brotherhood, but the often disconnected, character-led nature of The Stand-In means that she’s usually singing at half-mast in a sweet but mopey tone that seems to say, “don’t worry about me, I’ll be okay”; on the Hawaiian cabaret of “Golden Boy”, she pleas for a cad to stick around under the proviso, “I won’t ask you what you’re here for if you’ll stay.”
Although Rose’s voice contains fathoms of power largely untapped here, it is a striking instrument to carry a hypnotic, achey-breaky, pop-catchy chorus, of which she has bucketloads. It's the magnetic power of these choruses that stop The Stand-In from slipping into classy, stiflingly comfortable pastiche. She bares her teeth a little on “Waitin’”, a scathing, sad number where two former halves of a couple realize that neither party ever thought it would work out; on “Only a Clown”, co-written with the Jayhawks’ Gary Louris, she flips a clichéd couplet about putting “a record on” and having the “band play a song” by rolling her eyes at the idea that songs “all about love and believing” have anything at all to do with real life.
The Stand-In opts out of such conundrums by existing in a sort of fantasy world where people call the radio when they have no-one else to speak to-- more over, where people call each other at all. Its use of swooning pedal steel, twangin’ electric guitar, and ringing tube amps give it a period-perfect, shuttered-off feel that's occasionally prone to becoming a tad cheesy, but in an un-self-conscious, honest fashion. Rose's imperviousness to the whims of modern production and concerns is admirable in a way, though she's undoubtedly got the chops to shed the stylistic crutch if she wanted to.
