Case Oats: Last Missouri Exit (CD)

The debut album by Case Oats is a remarkably assured record, the band — Spencer Tweedy (drums), Max Subar (guitar, pedal steel), Jason Ashworth (bass), Scott Daniel (fiddle), and Nolan Chin (piano, organ) — gelling around Casey Gomez Walker’s voice and guitar.

Last Missouri Exit is a collection of sharply drawn character studies, Gomez Walker’s background in creative writing expressing itself in wry observation and a disarmingly easy sense of the lyric, the profound and profane tumbling out of songs like “Bitter Root Lake” with the weight of a confessional poem and the ease of a conversation between friends.

1. Buick Door
2. Nora
3. Bitter Root Lake
4. Kentucky Cave
5. Seventeen
6. Wishing Stone
7. In A Bungalow
8. Tennessee
9. Hallelujah
10. Bluff