Them Bones

After the two-hour sprawl of “Outlandia,” Rose narrows the lens back down to something you can hold in one hand, and “Them Bones” benefits from the compression. It opens the way you’d hope: clean arpeggios ringing out with a touch of chorus and delay, a breathy verse that keeps asking “Have you run aground / Did you miss that sound” like a man tapping you on the shoulder. Then the chorus arrives around the forty-second mark and the whole thing swells, power chords and layered harmonies pushing “Rattle me down them bones / Rattle me down to sleep” from confession into something closer to a sea shanty gone electric. The nautical imagery, mist and sails and dice that lie, gives the whole thing a superstitious pull, and the guitar solo in the bridge sings with enough reverb to feel like it’s coming from the next room. If there’s a caveat, it’s that at 4:24 the two-verse, two-chorus frame leans hard on repetition; the payoff is the mood, not the map, so it rewards a listener already tuned to Rose’s wavelength. A grower, and a fine one for the faithful.