The life of a music critic is one of perpetual bombardment, so much so that scouring my inbox for new artists to check out can sometimes feel like a crapshoot. PR firms try to maximize that eye-catching potential in their subject headings, but the whims of a critic are unpredictable, fickle, and most importantly, self-centered. Case(y) in point: I discovered Chicago alt-country outfit Case Oats primarily because I saw the band was led by another female Casey (there are very few of us, and even fewer who spell our name correctly—looking at you, Kacey Musgraves). At the time, nothing in my weekly new music sweep was really standing out; the songs all seemed to be drenched in fuzz and haze, their vocals airy, gauzy, and heavily produced, their soundscapes built from synth and distortion. To be clear: this sound, dream-pop and diet shoegaze fit with a bit of Auto-Tune, isn’t bad, per se, but it can start to feel increasingly uniform. And then I clicked on “Nora” by Case Oats—again, largely because I felt a moral obligation to support a fellow Casey—and found it was the breath of air I had been looking for.
Case Oats’ debut record, Last Missouri Exit, does not reinvent the wheel. But it isn’t trying to, nor does it need to. Frontwoman Casey Gomez Walker’s voice undoubtedly calls on the earnest plaintiveness of Mo Tucker, her songwriting brings to mind David Berman’s interpolation of lived-in specifics and heart-rendingly blunt self-analysis, and the instrumentation takes after Wilco (unsurprising, considering Spencer Tweedy is Gomez Walker’s fiancé and the band’s drummer). The record is squarely set in alt-country territory, yet it still feels fresher than a host of recent albums straining to claim some “lush” sound as invention. Case Oats aren’t forcing originality or fleeing lineage—they’re simply writing what they know, and in doing so, carve out something novel..
It helps, too, that the band—Gomez Walker and Tweedy alongside Max Subar (guitar, pedal steel), Jason Ashworth (bass), Scott Daniel (fiddle), and Nolan Chin (piano, organ)—evidently view the Case Oats “sound” as malleable and ever-changing; not some static standard to meet. The album might not venture out of alt-country territory often, but that doesn’t mean there’s no exploration; it just goes for depth rather than breadth. Rather than spanning myriad genres, Case Oats instead takes listeners on a veritable road-trip through the entirety of alt-country and all its nooks and crannies. “Seventeen” is pure Kimya Dawson with its up-tempo melody and deadpan talk-singing. On the other hand, the twang and rhythm of “Bitter Root Lake,” a Dateline-inspired homage to the age-old folk tradition of the murder ballad, calls The Old 97s to mind.
While “Tennessee” is sonically the most straightforward country song on the record, the wry melancholy in self-effacing lines like “We could’ve been on old porch swings / But I’m back in the city, figuring out ways to drink more” is all Berman (as is album closer, “Bluff”). And both the hauntingly bare-bones delivery of “I never wanted you to die in that Kentucky cave” (“Kentucky Cave”) and the sharp, cutting edge of Gomez Walker’s higher register in “Hallelujah” scratched the same otherwise-unscratchable itch that only Wet Nose Hero’s Congratulations, Ha Ha has previously sated (shoutout to the band’s 26 other Spotify listeners; we are small but we are mighty).
Form is best used as an extension of content, and Last Missouri Exit delivers that in spades—both in the sense that the warm, intimate coziness of the instrumentation feels right for an album so much about the concept of home, and in the sense that the band’s refusal to be precious with their music or identity feels right for an album so keen on exploring how the concept of home changes, ebbs, flows, expands, and contracts over time. The record is a largely autobiographical collection of songs that, put together, build into something of a bildungsroman—but the arduous task and eventual relief of growing up is not a linear one. Rather than spinning a yarn that guides listeners from point A (childhood) to point B (adulthood), Gomez Walker dips in and out of the past, interweaving it with her present. The album is, in many ways, a time capsule: capturing not only how it feels to be a child, but how it feels to think back on childhood from your twenties, and then how it feels to revisit that memory from adulthood proper. The timeline loops and folds back on itself, recursive and layered. Yet despite all this potential for brooding, the record’s defining tone is warmth rather than regret.
Time is, by nature, amorphous and life, by nature, finite. But on Last Missouri Exit, neither of those truths are greeted with fear. Even when facing down the barrel of life’s most notoriously terrifying constants, Gomez Walker barely flinches, instead embracing fate with open arms. The whole thing reeks of a kind of radical acceptance that, ironically, the ages the album reminisces on are defined by categorically refusing. When you’re 17, everything is alien and terrifying. But when you’re 30 singing a song you wrote in your twenties about how you felt at seventeen, the sharpness softens, deepens into something more layered. Like wine, some things just need to age.
That’s not to say the record traffics in a kind of simplistic optimism, or waves away those very real fears in favor of some vague feel-good notion of positivity. There’s no denial of pain or loss or dread, no sugar-coating of past, present, or future. Put simply, everything is seen for what it is, and then accepted anyways. As Gomez Walker sings on “Tennessee:” “It hurts, but that’s how it goes.” Sometimes you miss your friends, and that’s fine. Sometimes you miss people you shouldn’t, and that’s fine too. Sometimes you long to be a child again, if only to remind yourself how it feels to feel. Sometimes you fall out of love, sometimes someone falls out of love with you, and sometimes, as on “Bitter Root Lake,” you and your lover fall from the sky in a crashing plane and only one of you makes it out alive, the other left to bloat with water in the bottom of a lake. It hurts, but—to quote the utterly devastating refrain on “Seventeen,” the hope in its words undercut by a bone-deep numbness, and vice versa—”Aren’t you glad you didn’t kill yourself?”