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I don’t know if there’s a world record for longest gap between a song’s debut in a Tiny Desk concert and its eventual release, but I suspect Caroline Rose holds it. In 2015, Rose was a 25-year-old Americana songwriter with a twang-soaked voice when they performed “Yip Yip Yow,” a gibberish-filled psychobilly joyride, behind public radio’s most revered desk. The song sounded like a blast, with a call-and-response refrain that pulls you by the collar, inducing you to join in: “Yip yow yip yow yow!/Yip yow yip yip yip yow!” But its country-stomp arrangement felt a little too… polite.
Rose soon shed their Americana trappings, publicly embraced their queerness, and revamped their musical identity. They reintroduced themself on their next record, 2018’s thrilling LONER, as a shape-shifting alt-pop weirdo, clad in bright-red jumpsuits and a devilish smirk. They’d once wanted to be a Serious Songwriter, à la Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell, but “Yip Yip Yow” pointed the way to a wackier, freer mode of writing. And yet, Rose omitted “Yip Yip Yow” from LONER. “I just couldn’t quite get it to fit,” the artist recalled, “and I was so afraid that it was gonna be my most popular song that I thought was also my dumbest song.”
No score yet, be the first to add.
Fast forward eight years: Rose finally releases “Yip Yip Yow,” then makes it the lead track on their seventh album, Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall. With Gentling the Horse, Rose hasn’t just arrived at the definitive version of “Yip Yip Yow”—loud and lacerating, the result of their instructing their band to “play like a teenager who’s never picked up an instrument before”—but has finally crafted an album worthy of its nonsensical zeal. It’s the singer’s wackiest and funniest LP to date, with a violent edge and a madcap gleam coursing through its portraits of lovable fuck-ups and suburban dread.
Gentling the Horse’s absurdist humor and breakneck tempos signify a sharp break from 2023’s melancholy The Art of Forgetting. Co-produced by John Congleton, the record swaps synth-pop for gutter-punk, with distorted guitars and clattering surf riffs as its weapons of choice. Several songs (“Everything in Its Right Place,” “Conversation with Shiv [AKA liquid k song],” “Goddamn Train”) appeared previously, in demo-ish form, on last year’s iPhone-recorded Year of the Slug, but here they hit with considerably more oomph and color.
As a vocalist, Rose has never sounded zanier or more frenzied. On “Goddamn Train,” one of several tracks harnessing a mile-a-minute momentum, they build a delirious punk tantrum around a litany of societal obligations: “Gotta get fixed/Gotta get stitched/Gotta get hitched/Gotta get snipped!” It’s like U2’s “Numb” on laughing gas. The lyrics come so fast, it’s easy to miss some of the grimmest quips (“For another hundred dollars one time offer/Get more foot room in the meat grinder!”). And the raucous “RIDE (!!!)” earns its parenthetical with a delivery that sounds like it ought to be hollered into a bullhorn at an auto-parts junkyard. The song’s lineup of unsavory characters includes a “sylvan siren in a tin foil hat” and a pastor who “left his wife for a hentai girl.” All somehow seem at home in Rose’s cartoonish menagerie of delinquents.
Rose named this album after the Walt Whitman Shops in their native Long Island, bemused by the sheer absurdity of naming a suburban mall after a queer, nature-loving poet. Fittingly, Gentling the Horse’s overriding theme is a fascination with the oddballs who scrape by on the fringes of capitalist society. Some of these portraits are funny, like “Chow Mein,” about a down-and-out loser vomiting leftover Chinese on the shoes of a bouncer guarding access to a club they can’t afford. A yodeling refrain ripples through the chorus, in which Rose deludedly insists: “I am doing fine.” Others are just plain sobering: On “Conversation with Shiv,” Rose reconnects with an old friend whose life seems to be a spiral of drug benders and money woes. There’s a breezy nostalgia to the song’s debauched memories, but regret haunts the edges: “I’m sorry how I left things with ya/Curled up on the bathroom floor,” Rose sings.
The prevailing wisdom has been that Rose oscillates between albums where they’re playing with character (LONER, Superstar) and albums where they’re singing from the heart (the uncharacteristically somber Art of Forgetting). On Gentling the Horse, they’re clearly doing both. And that heart is made of asphalt, as Rose informs us on “Cement Head,” an anatomical freak manifesto set to a demented groove that sounds like The Cramps tried to cover the Inspector Gadget theme.
In other words, Rose is the misfit-in-chief here, one of those songwriters whose gibberish songs are somehow their most profound. They’ve described “Yip Yip Yow” not as a nonsense singalong but as a song about “feeling like a little weirdo freak living in my own alt fantasy world.” On Gentling the Horse at the Walt Whitman Mall, they make that world feel big enough for the rest of us to climb inside and peek around.
