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| Pastemagazine |
 Expat singer/songwriter Josh Rouse is a musical chameleon, exploding into beautiful new aural shades with each record. His 2003 album, 1972, was a tribute to the AM pop and proto-disco sounds of his birth year. Two years later, he released Nashville, which explored a more contemporary fusion of folk rock and subtle electronic flourishes. But the biggest sonic shift came in 2006 when Rouse moved to Spain and began soaking up that country’s rich culture.The result, Subtitulo, featured some Spanish-titled songs, a laidback feel and plenty of nylon-string guitar. On his latest, El Turista, Rouse takes things a step further, diving headfirst into jazzy, lushly orchestrated, early-’60s-indebted Spanish-language tunes that play like a cross between Astrud Gilberto’s bossa-nova classics and Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas. Rouse even ventures into The Rhythm of the Saints-era Paul Simon territory (“I Will Live on Islands”) and channels Eric Burdon & War (“Lemon Tree”), stamping it all with his unmistakable croon....full text |
| Popmatters |
| El Turista is an appropriate title for a Josh Rouse album, given the Nebraska-born singer’s penchant for moving around from one place to another. Yet Rouse’s music emphasizes the pleasures of settling as much as travel. Rouse himself has called a number of places home over the years, both in the USA and in Spain, where he relocated in 2005. The titles of his albums tell a large part of this dialectic between movement and stasis: Dressed Up Like Nebraska (1998), Home (2000), Nashville (2005), Country Mouse City House (2007). Home is a time as much as a place for Rouse, as his lovely, lovingly crafted album 1972 proved in 2003. Even more than an era, it is a season that Rouse’s sound constantly evokes, the sound of summer. This is a man who can make a song about the forecast of rainy weather (“Winter in the Hamptons”, from Nashville) glow with a warm fuzziness that only remembered summers have. True to form, El Turista takes as its themes home, the exotic, and the past, folding the three into each other for a 10-track set of hazy summer pop. As the title suggests, a number of the tracks bear Spanish titles or are sung in Spanish. Rouse has done this before, with Subtitulo (2006) and She’s Spanish, I’m American (2007), the latter recorded with his then-girlfriend (now wife) Paz Suay. On the new album, there is the additional element of ranging and arranging across the musico-geographical spectrum. “I Will Live On Islands” was apparently inspired by The Roots of Rumba Rock, an anthology of Congolese music. Cuban music is another influence, reflected in the inclusion of two covers of songs associated with Cuban singer-pianist Bola de Nieve, “Drume Mobila” (here “Duerme”) and “Messié Julián” (“Mesie Julian”). Throughout there is the lost summer haze of classic bossa nova and Latin-inspired easy listening music....full text |
| Avclub |
| Josh Rouse’s latest album deflects most listeners’ first complaint with its title. Born in the Midwest, Rouse married a Spanish woman and moved to Valencia five years ago. Post-move efforts like Subtitulo and She’s Spanish, I’m American feature a distinct, though unmistakably casual, interest in some new sounds, a trend that El Turista continues. It also, sadly, carries on Rouse’s newfound emphasis on pleasant textures over passion and songcraft. Rouse never settles into any of these styles; he’s just breezing through. Turista also feels assembled from the stray ends of better ideas. An interest in Bola De Nieve makes itself known via two covers of songs the Cuban musician made famous, both sung in awkwardly accented Spanish. Another cover, a strange take on “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” provides one of the better moments, however. That’s partly by contrast; there’s more drama in Rouse’s languid, almost disoriented reading than on an original like “Lemon Tree,” a long drift through a pleasant landscape with no discernible destination. Apart from a few standouts, like the Graceland-hearkening “I Will Live On Islands,” Turista offers mostly seaswept dinner music for people who don’t want much to chew on....full text |
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