Rameen from Amoeba contacted me to say thanks for embedding the Conor Oberst video last night. At the same time he invited me to check out the videos they've dne in the past, as well as the future. You're in for a treat! There are close to 200 videos featuring everyone from Flipper to Richard Thompson. Plan to spend a few years enjoying the intimate, high-quality movies. Amoeba In-Store Videos.
The first few hits on the drumset make me ready for a rousing good time from Conor Oberst & the Mystic Valley Band to rock my soul and keep my ear full of pleasant tasting music and dreams. I’ve listened in about a dozen times, and can honestly say that, as usual, Conor takes me deep within myself – a line sung in the song will take my mind off to deep memories and thoughts and return just in time to hear another line that will take my mind off on another tangent. That’s good for me, I enjoy these mind trips. But I won’t be able to coherently tell you the story Conor wants to convey. And that’s okay, because when you buy this CD you’ll experience your own newly uncovered dreams and deep thoughts.
I’ve thought a lot about how he pulls this off. Usually a guy doesn’t tell me a story, I tune him out. Conor has an uncanny ability to dig up stories from within myself, some of which I forgot about or never knew existed. How does he manage to do this? Conviction. Each note comes out of his mouth with complete and total conviction that the song is important and he has found a fantastic back-up band to support his convictions.
The first cut rocks Slowly (Oh So Slowly) – “the veil between the world and the faceless bride” – right off the bat we are reminded we are listening to a poet. “Dementia, you better treat me good. The human race is in its second childhood.” Another line lets me know that I’m not the only one who uses music as an escape from reality, “Sometimes I need a place to go. Classical music plays from my radio. I sit real still, let my shadow grow.”
An acoustic guitar strums To All The Lights In The Windows until the band gets me up on my feet dancing circles to biblical allusions. “That’s the thing about charisma – it makes everyone believe.” Big Black Nothing keeps the rock & roll beat while the poet is singing about “fooling everyone” and asking “will you still be my friend if I told you it’s all just pretend?” There is some cool call & response going on with the band in this song, which makes for a lot of fun, especially when they begin the clap-along joyful noise. “I’m real scared, but so prepared for the worst.”
Air Mattress was weird on the last tour, and is just as weird here – but in fun way. Like a quick just for fun break in the proceedings, a lightning fast dance to “twist the night away.” An 80’s flavored pop punk song about sharing – I picked up on that!
Cabbage Town is a beautiful tribute to Steve Nieve’s work with Elvis Costello. Ten Women Between You And Me is a self-confessed acoustic-flavored fantasy tune, “I’m biding my time like a cellar of wine.” The fun has a sorta bittersweet flavor when the poet looks for “one witness to mourn for our love,” and admits that the fantasy is a “tragedy”. Difference Is Time reminds me of “Lay Lady Lay” because Conor’s voice takes on a completely different timbre to tell this tale, “I want to be done with everything I know.” He includes an epitaph for his headstone, “Life is hard, even if you cheat.” This performance may be the classic one that gets played from this album 40 years from now.
I talked about Nikorette last year, and still feel the same time warp when listening to this performance. “There’s nothing more sad than a lynching mob full of rational men who believe in God.” The song also includes a bit of reality that turns out to be prophecy for the capitalist created crisis that has affected the economy of the poor and middle class while the rich stuff their pockets. “My neighbor dreams big ‘cause his house is small, says all he needs now is some capital. It’s a pirate world, it’s a free-for-all. They take your bright ideas and they make them dull. . . It’s all just a fix.”
Bloodlines is a summer radio-ready pop masterpiece, “How could you refuse to believe it’s a wonderful life? Two sheets to the wind all over again”. Spoiled is a perfect follow-up summer radio song, the music happy & joyful over lyrics proclaiming “you get everything you want and you still feel down.” Total pop irony, I love it. Dance the depression away. Complete with party noises. This late summer song will play well, even after school has started and the kids are all writing their “what I did” essay. Worldwide is the radio song for autumn, “there’s a place you go when the weather’s cold, leave it all behind.” How I long for the days when there were radio stations that played songs like these. Dream on. Roosevelt Room is the ‘underground’ FM radio cut, complete with some far-out guitar solos bouncing off the organists salutations.
It’s hard to tell how serious the band wants us to take Snake Hill. Remember the guy who sang “Don’t Bogart” on the Easy Rider soundtrack. The voices sound like they’re pretending a southern accent, but the words have a serious intent. Leave it to someone smarter than I to figure out why the band chose this method to present this story of a young man seeking to visit the huge world outside his family surroundings. “I discovered that a girl was what my mother tried to hide from me. She can make you feel alive, she can make you want to die.”
Last year Conor made my personal list, as well as many other lists of top CDs for 2008. I have a real sneaky suspicion that this new CD is going to stay close enough to my CD player to reach the top CD list for 2009. A big thanks to Conor Oberst & the Mystic Valley Band for making this week start off with a blast and having me look forward to many hot summer days listening to this fine album.
Check out Conor’s website this week for a stream of Slowly (Oh So Slowly), the opening cut; and a free download of Nikorette. Also, keep your eye open for a downloadable documentary film, One Of A Kind, from the website soon – it is being offered at no cost, with the understanding that if you receive personal benefit from it that you’ll donate some cash toward charity. Conor Oberst
Nikorette Live:
A year ago - Souled Out:
A beautifully filmed live show from last year from Amoeba.com:
2008 has been an outstanding year for listening to new music.
This year I stopped trying to figure out which are indie labels and which aren’t. In the past I’d pick one indie label and one major release each month. Turns out the major labels have cool ways of making us believe some of these are indie releases. Most of them are pretty transparent, but not all. So, I simply made a list of the albums that play all the way through every single time. Not single cuts that sound great every single time – that’s what we specialize in here daily; but those few, really special complete albums that are fully worthy of your investment of time and $$$.
The statistics. Over 200 cds arrive here every month. Of those, I pick a song or two off 30 of them to feature on eartaste. About 2 a month (less than 1%) stay on my cd player a lot, months at a time, and are always within handy reach. There are many different styles – style isn’t important. These are chosen because there is not one clunker on the album, and most of the time the songs add depth to each other by playing straight through.
So, here we go, in no particular order, the 24 best albums of 2008 – planned to give 24 hours of amazing music to listen to any day of the year.
Edit: December 26: My daughter sprang this one on me at Christmas, so this one will be late, but it's definitely one of my top favorite albums of 2008: Vampire Weekend
So now there's 25. Life goes on! It's worth staying up an extra hour each day just to hear these jokers!
“There's no sorrow that the sun's not gonna help.” I quote lyrics a lot in this blog, because I love a good line, a story, something to catch onto to remind me I’m alive. I also read a lot of poetry, and have a tendency to separate song poems and literary poetry, mostly because the literature works more subliminally, using language to emote more than what’s being said on the page. Why bring all this up? What intrigues me about Conor is his imagery. I’ve listened over and over and will capture one image and dwell on it for awhile, enough to miss the rest of the song. Next time another image lingers. For example, in this song we go from a short story about Sausalito to an iceberg, then quickly to the pilgrims. It works on the level of poetry, bringing all these images into feelings that are extremely personal and self-satisfying. What intrigues me about this is the music is so good, and works. It doesn’t hurt that he’s very confident in his performance. I believe he means it, and even if I can’t pretend to understand the story, I understand the emotions I’m being moved to feel. Shoutouts for Get-Well Cards (“all the peacock people left the plumes in a pile”), and the powerful meditation Milk Thistle (“You bring peace to midnight like a spotted owl”).
A special note for the lovely tune Danny Callahan (“What gauge measures miracles?”), mostly because whether I’m right or not, seems to me to be about a young boy who died from cancer. That’s what I get from the lyric, one of the few I can follow as a full, deeply felt story. Sometimes when I listen to the album I’m feeling like this entire album is about Danny Callahan. There’s another key song, I Don't Want to Die In the Hospital, that enhances this thought for me.
Conors been on stage for many years now, and is a master at bringing the audience into his world. He manages to capture that fairly well on this new album, however his recent internet performance is absolutely mesmerizing. [LINK TO STREAM] I love this lyric from Nikorette: “I don’t want to go to your Mason lodge. There’s nothing more sad than a lynching mob full of rational men who believe in God.” I know exactly where that lyric comes from because I live in a very small town with 7 churches and a Mason Lodge. The men who are Lodge Members belong to these churches. I have acquaintances among them, most of them men who are not many years older than me. I always come away from the conversations extremely sad and confused. These men are proud of participating in some of the last lynchings that took place in Texas – right here in this ton and the next county over – in the 1970’s. I was at a “Christian Youth Concert” earlier this year as a volunteer and hear on stage one of the performers waxing on about the fact that there are no Jewish Synagogues anywhere to be found in the hills of Texas, and people, including children, were actually cheering. I asked the guy sitting next to me what that was all about and he smiled and said, “We chased them out of town even before we chased the blacks out.” No regret, no sadness, a true sense of pride.
Scary people I am living among. These are the same type of people that were shouting “Kill him Kill Him” when Sarah Palin spoke and were Booing when McCain mentioned Obama in his concession speech. They’re still alive and walking among us. I have talked about this with another guy, a bit younger than me, and I thought a bit more knowledgeable about the rest of the world because he has done some traveling and teaching overseas. He pointed out that when I was in the army, and then came home to protest against the war, that the Vietnam war was filling all the newspapers – people in the hills were simply ignored by the media. Then he said a few scary things. I think its Texans in general, they simply have this feeling that God is white. I know there’s a book in all this. Just the fact that lynchings were taking place in America in the 1970’s simply amazes me – it’s not a part of our popular history. It’s in all their collective memories, and there seems to be no guilt or shame. One of my supervisors told me that when they were younger there was a huge sign right outside of town that said “If you’re black, turn back.” This is not new, and I’ve probably told bits and pieces of this story in this blog before, but it all comes pouring out of my brain and into my fingers because Conor said all this and more in 25 words or less. A true poet. “I don’t want to go to your Mason lodge. There’s nothing more sad than a lynching mob full of rational men who believe in God.”
I'm cleaning up my desk & trying to bring some order back, so for the next few days you'll see a list of cool songs by cool groups that you can dig out on Amazon or CDBaby. Worth the search.
The Submarines - Epic Air Voyage Noah And The Whale - Shape Of My Heart The All New Adventures Of Us - Firetruck Anni Rossi - Machine Of Montreal - And I've Seen A Bloody Shadow The View - Five Rebecca's Pearl And The Puppets - Make Me Smile The Boat People - Awkward Orchid Orchard Conor Oberst - Gentlemen's Pact Josephine Oniyama - No Fiction Beach House - Used To Be The Smittens - Half My Heart Beats Death Cab For Cutie - No Sunlight Liam Finn - Better To Be Dear And The Headlights - I'm Not Crying. You're Not Crying, Are You The Walkmen - On The Water Her Space Holiday - The Year In Review The Apples In Stereo - Same Old Drag The School - Shoulder Stars And Sons - In The Ocean Hello Seahorse! - Won't Say Anything Bearsuit - Itsuko Got Married Psapp - Part Like Waves
The first few hits on the drumset make me ready for a rousing good time from Conor Oberst & the Mystic Valley Band to rock my soul and keep my ear full of pleasant tasting music and dreams. I’ve listened in about a dozen times, and can honestly say that, as usual, Conor takes me deep within myself – a line sung in the song will take my mind off to deep memories and thoughts and return just in time to hear another line that will take my mind off on another tangent. That’s good for me, I enjoy these mind trips. But I won’t be able to coherently tell you the story Conor wants to convey. And that’s okay, because when you buy this CD you’ll experience your own newly uncovered dreams and deep thoughts. 
“There's no sorrow that the sun's not gonna help.” I quote lyrics a lot in this blog, because I love a good line, a story, something to catch onto to remind me I’m alive. I also read a lot of poetry, and have a tendency to separate song poems and literary poetry, mostly because the literature works more subliminally, using language to emote more than what’s being said on the page. Why bring all this up? What intrigues me about Conor is his imagery. I’ve listened over and over and will capture one image and dwell on it for awhile, enough to miss the rest of the song. Next time another image lingers. For example, in this song we go from a short story about Sausalito to an iceberg, then quickly to the pilgrims. It works on the level of poetry, bringing all these images into feelings that are extremely personal and self-satisfying. What intrigues me about this is the music is so good, and works. It doesn’t hurt that he’s very confident in his performance. I believe he means it, and even if I can’t pretend to understand the story, I understand the emotions I’m being moved to feel. Shoutouts for Get-Well Cards (“all the peacock people left the plumes in a pile”), and the powerful meditation Milk Thistle (“You bring peace to midnight like a spotted owl”).