{"id":1974409,"date":"2025-08-22T13:51:45","date_gmt":"2025-08-22T13:51:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=1974409"},"modified":"2025-08-22T13:51:45","modified_gmt":"2025-08-22T13:51:45","slug":"case-oats-last-missouri-exit-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/case-oats-last-missouri-exit-album-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Case Oats, ‘Last Missouri Exit’ Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n

\ufeff<\/span>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\u2014looking 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\u2019t bad, per se, but it can<\/em> start to feel increasingly uniform. And then I clicked on \u201cNora\u201d by Case Oats\u2014again, largely because I felt a moral obligation to support a fellow Casey\u2014and found it was the breath of air I had been looking for.<\/p>\n

Case Oats\u2019 debut record, Last Missouri Exit<\/em>, does not reinvent the wheel. But it isn\u2019t trying to, nor does it need to. Frontwoman Casey Gomez Walker\u2019s voice undoubtedly calls on the earnest plaintiveness of Mo Tucker, her songwriting brings to mind David Berman\u2019s interpolation of lived-in specifics and heart-rendingly blunt self-analysis, and the instrumentation takes after Wilco (unsurprising, considering Spencer Tweedy is Gomez Walker\u2019s fianc\u00e9 and the band\u2019s 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 \u201clush\u201d sound as invention. Case Oats aren\u2019t forcing originality or fleeing lineage\u2014they\u2019re simply writing what they know, and in doing so, carve out something novel..<\/p>\n

It helps, too, that the band\u2014Gomez Walker and Tweedy alongside Max Subar (guitar, pedal steel), Jason Ashworth (bass), Scott Daniel (fiddle), and Nolan Chin (piano, organ)\u2014evidently view the Case Oats \u201csound\u201d 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\u2019t mean there\u2019s 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. \u201cSeventeen\u201d is pure Kimya Dawson with its up-tempo melody and deadpan talk-singing. On the other hand, the twang and rhythm of \u201cBitter Root Lake,\u201d a Dateline-inspired homage to the age-old folk tradition of the murder ballad, calls The Old 97s to mind.<\/p>\n

While \u201cTennessee\u201d is sonically the most straightforward country song on the record, the wry melancholy in self-effacing lines like \u201cWe could\u2019ve been on old porch swings \/ But I\u2019m back in the city, figuring out ways to drink more\u201d is all Berman (as is album closer, \u201cBluff\u201d). And both the hauntingly bare-bones delivery of \u201cI never wanted you to die in that Kentucky cave\u201d (\u201cKentucky Cave\u201d) and the sharp, cutting edge of Gomez Walker\u2019s higher register in \u201cHallelujah\u201d scratched the same otherwise-unscratchable itch that only Wet Nose Hero\u2019s Congratulations, Ha Ha<\/em> has previously sated (shoutout to the band\u2019s 26 other Spotify listeners; we are small but we are mighty).<\/p>\n

Form is best used as an extension of content, and Last Missouri Exit<\/em> delivers that in spades\u2014both in the sense that the warm, intimate coziness of the instrumentation feels right for an album so much about the concept of home, and<\/em> in the sense that the band\u2019s 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<\/em>\u2014but 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<\/em> memory from adulthood proper. The timeline loops and folds back on itself, recursive and layered. Yet despite all this potential for brooding, the record\u2019s defining tone is warmth rather than regret.<\/p>\n

Time is, by nature, amorphous and life, by nature, finite. But on Last Missouri Exit<\/em>, neither of those truths are greeted with fear. Even when facing down the barrel of life\u2019s 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\u2019re 17, everything is alien and terrifying. But when you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cTennessee:\u201d \u201cIt hurts, but that\u2019s how it goes.\u201d Sometimes you miss your friends, and that\u2019s fine. Sometimes you miss people you shouldn\u2019t, and that\u2019s 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 \u201cBitter Root Lake,\u201d 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\u2014to quote the utterly devastating refrain on \u201cSeventeen,\u201d the hope in its words undercut by a bone-deep numbness, and vice versa\u2014\u201dAren\u2019t you glad you didn\u2019t kill yourself?\u201d<\/p>\n