Caitlin Rose - Manchester Ruby Lounge - 1st March 2013

Caitlin Rose

Manchester Ruby Lounge

Friday 1st March 2013

Caitlin Rose released her second album The Stand In last week.  We caught up with her sold-out show at Manchester’s Ruby Lounge to witness how Nashville’s finest recent export has beefed up her sound and charmed a boisterous Manchester crowd.
As with her new album, the immediate thing you notice with Caitlin Rose live is how her sound and presence has developed in the two and half years since Own Side Now.  Gone is a slightly timid nervous woman and what you have is a full-on confident young lady who’s able to replicate the controlled majesty of her second album The Stand In.

Backed with five friends from  Nashville, who perform two support slot duties between them, she is bold and brash, swigging from a bottle of beer after most songs, delivering tracks from the album and reinventing some of the more tender moments of debut Own Side Now with a fully fleshed out sound. 

There’s points where you think there might be just a little bit too much steel guitar going on, but it forms the framework for her to weave her vocal charms and enrapture the audience.  The stand out tracks of the album – Dallas, Pink Champagne, Waitin’ and Golden Boy – form the centerpiece of the set and betray much more depth to Caitlin’s sound than the easy country comparisons from her Nashville roots.

There’s elements of music hall and jazz in the sound, and even the typically muddy Ruby Lounge sound can’t dissipate that beauty. There’s a lot of banter between her and the crowd, a gaggle of girls at the front insist on shouting something between each song which she bats off with humour and she engages with the crowd with a smile on her face which is disarming and playful.

 There’s time for her to play a couple of acoustic numbers on her own in the encore before the crowd favourite Shanghai Cigarettes finishes the main set.  She comes back for a raucous drinking song Answer In One Of These Bottles which ends with the Ruby Lounge crowd singing along with her. 

Caitlin played : No One To Call,  Spare Me,  Only A Clown,  I Was Cruel,  For The Rabbits,  Old Numbers,  Waitin’,  Golden Boy,  Pink Champagne,  Dallas,  Silver Sings,  Menagerie,  Stoned,  Sinful Wishing Well, Tiger,  Shanghai Cigarettes and Answer In One Of These Bottles

Caitlin Rose's official website can be found here.  She is also on Twitter and Facebook.