Video: Alex Rose, ‘Grandmothers’

Kevin Bronson on December 4th, 2017

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“Everything will be alright,” Alex Rose repeats amid echoing guitar and doubtful viola on “Oblivion Seekers,” the closing track on her stunning album “Arcadian Pages.” It’s the denouement of an eight-song debut that casts the American landscape Rose has seen as the pastoral, mythological land of Arcadia. Rose’s vignettes, then, are not unlike the Roman poet Virgil’s “Eclogues.”

Roses’ reckonings were four years in the making. Born in L.A., reared in Austin and now back in the city of her birth, Rose made the album in Texas with co-producer Anni Rossi, whose deft hand with the viola, piano and percussion proves the perfect accent for the singer’s precise but delicate voice. The spare arrangements lend beautiful grandiosity to the smallest of the songwriter’s lyrical gestures — the a cappella “freewheeling heart” moment in “Elephant Eyes” (featuring Rossi on backing vocals), the “brave desires” in “Grandmothers,” the “mica night sky” in “Ponderosa Pines.”

“I’m telling my secrets to a memory,” Rose sings on the mystical “A Gun Called Patience,” and on “Arcadian Pages” you are it. Go someplace quiet and hear them.

||| Watch: The video for “Grandmothers”