#case oats

Photo by Braedan Long

BY KEITH MILLER

Chicago band Case Oats makes an immediate impression with their debut album, Last Missouri Exit, released in August on Merge. Thoughtful, steady, and inviting, it feels like the perfect soundtrack for a drive through the Midwest as you pass by cornfields, grain elevators, cows, and scattered patches of forest. While the record fits loosely within country music, it doesn’t chase a sound. Instead, it carries itself with sincerity and quiet honesty.

Band leader Casey Gomez Walker, along with Spencer Tweedy (drums), Max Subar (guitar), Jason Ashworth (bass), Scott Daniel (fiddle), and Nolan Chin (piano and organ), presents Last Missouri Exit as a series of small, sharply drawn tales. The folks who live in the songs struggle, endure, and find ways ahead. On tracks like “Seventeen” and “Tennessee,” their perseverance comes through selflessness. On the former, Walker sings, “I stayed up all night just to hear you breathe,” capturing how presence, alone, can keep another person going. “Bitter Root Lake” recounts a 1982 plane crash with restraint and empathy. Rather than lingering on tragedy, Walker writes from the perspective of someone haunted by guilt. “I watched it all unfold and still can’t look away,” she sings, blurring the line between witness and participant. “Hallelujah,” the album’s penultimate track, distills what Last Missouri Exit does best: balancing warmth with reflection. Sung from the point of view of a friend watching a loved one waste time on the wrong man, it hinges on the line, “I’ll carry you on my back to Michigan City,” a promise of dedication and companionship.

Last Missouri Exit takes its name from Walker’s drive between her childhood home in Missouri and her adult life in Chicago. As she repeatedly drove by a highway sign that read “Last Missouri Exit,” she began to see it as a marker between past and present, a reminder to steer forward with care even when the road is uncertain. At the album’s release show at The Hideout, Walker spoke about how fiction and personal memory overlap in her writing, which deepened the intimacy of hearing the record live. One of the night’s most touching moments came when she invited her father, Dan Walker, to join on saxophone for “Bungalow”, supplying the musically precise tune with a touch of familial tenderness. “Hallelujah” followed “Bungalow” and landed even harder in person, its themes of loyalty underscored by Walker’s calm delivery. Later, the band stretched out with a cover of The Clash’s “Lost in the Supermarket,” showing an easy command of tone and energy beyond Last Missouri Exit’s softer textures. They closed with a new song, “Wonderful,” a buoyant finale that suggested the band’s future is wide open.

Last Missouri Exit marks a confident beginning for Case Oats, one built on strong narrative, a lived-in aesthetic, and a genuine connection among writer, band, and audience. This is a group fully in touch with the stories they tell and the people they tell them to.

The Wednesday Watch is Orestes P. Xistos’ weekly column. We do not align with its radical political beliefs, that include a wild theory about Lenny Kravitz left pinky, but Orestes delivers on time, with plenty of typos, and always includes jammie dodgers and wagon wheels on the christmas basket. Hi, lovely people, specially our readers in Norway and Finland! I’m writing about Gregory and the…