The Beatles: "Let It Be... Naked"

While we’re on the subject of swan songs, what’s all this about the new version of Let It Be that claims itself as “Let It Be, as it was meant to be?” Well, besides its tagline being total bullshit (Let It Be was arguably never “meant to be,” as anyone who’s seen pieces of the ill-fated film will tell you), Let It Be… Naked is Paul McCartney’s own interpretation of the Beatles’ raggedly sublime final release and what was previously a rather Lennon-ized affair (“there will be an answer,” indeed). Gone is Phil Spector’s post-production on “The Long and Winding Road,” “Across The Universe,” and “I Me Mine,” as well as “Maggie Mae” and “Dig It” in their entirety (no great loss). The immediate results? Well, “The Long and Winding” road sounds a hell of a lot better without Spector’s overenthusiastic string arrangements, but let’s face it, it still kind of sucks and doesn’t hold a candle to McCartney’s other compositions on the album. “Across The Universe” features an unadorned and bone-dry vocal by Lennon, rock’s greatest proponents of voice effects, that may well have him spinning in his grave and gains absolutely nothing on the original. The only new inclusion is the classic “Don’t Let Me Down,” though the mid-tempo version on Naked lacks some of the soul-ballad scorch of the famed rooftop interpretation, and while the tracks are now in a different order, that’s nothing that couldn’t be a accomplished with a copy of the original and a CD-RW drive. In short, Let It Be… Naked is a fairly unnecessary project for anyone short of Sir Paul himself and a handful of hardcore Beatles trivialists, and those who buy it in search of a revelation might well get the feeling they’ve been cheated. But come on, cheer up. All comparisons to the original aside, Let It Be in any form will still the best collection of rock music released this year, and the sanctified elegance of the title track—found here with a lovely new vocal and guitar solo—will still reduce you to tears on the subway any morning of the week. Anyone who ever claimed that Paul ruined the Beatles lacks heart.

Originally published in Block, December 2003

Jay-Z: "The Black Album" (Review)

Since seismically altering hip hop with his 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt, Jay-Z has established himself as arguably the most prolific and consistent hitmaker in the history of the genre. Over an eight-year career that has produced no less than eleven albums’ worth of material, no artist has been more responsible for ushering rap from its origins in b-boy iconoclasm into the roughneck cosmopolitanism of today more than the artist occasionally known as Jigga, J-Hova, Hov, Iceberg Slim… you get the picture. Whatever the alias, he’s the voice of his generation, and now, upon the release of The Black Album, Jay-Z has suddenly announced that he’s retiring. And who knows if we should believe him; rappers have certainly retired and un-retired before, as have writers, athletes, politicians, and just about everyone else, and if you’re wary of the suggestion that Jay-Z—clearly a music addict to top all others—might really just pack it all in at the drop of a dime, feel free to abstain from drinking the Kool-Aid.

But on the off-chance that The Black Album really is Jay-Z’s ride into the sunset on those iced-out rims of his Bentley, he’s certainly gone out on top, because The Black Album is a terrific record, a 14-track tour-de-force that’s surely one of the best of his career. It’s also a stirring return to form after the double-album meanderings of last year’s Blueprint²: The Gift And The Curse. Lyrically he’s never been sharper, and while Jay-Z’s rhymes have always had a deep soul that belies his icy hustler persona, The Black Album actually finds him more political than ever before. “Rehabilitated, man, I still feel hatred/ I’m young, black and rich/ so they wanna strip me naked,” he spits on “Threat,” and over the course of the record takes digs at everyone from George W. Bush to Bill O’Reilly. And the hits will keep on coming, rest assured: while you’ll undoubtedly spend the next 6 months hearing “Change Clothes” pour out of neighborhood SUVs, you’ll also be better for it, as the Neptunes slap a pretty, airy hook over a infectiously danceable beat and Jigga himself has never sounded better. The ferociously clever “99 Problems” features a hard-rock beat from Rick Rubin (complete with Mountain sample), and the Eminem-produced “Moment of Clarity” sounds suspiciously like something out of “8 Mile” but nonetheless coaxes one of Jay’s best performances on the record. Sure, The Black Album falls slightly short of the explosive nihilism of Reasonable Doubt and the clobbering virtuosity of 2001’s The Blueprint, but really, what doesn’t? If this really is the end of Jay-Z then it’s a nothing less than a goddamn shame. He’s the best there is, and has been for eight years: we should be so lucky that he continue to remind us.

Originally published in Block, December 2003

The Strokes: "Room On Fire" (Review)

There is no substitute for melody in rock n roll. This simple declarative is the best starting point towards explaining the quiet dazzle of the Strokes’ sophomore effort, Room On Fire, an album that begs to be played so loudly there ought to be nothing quiet about it. If by chance you haven’t yet heard of the Strokes, or haven’t yet formed an opinion (even less likely), let me be the first to welcome you to Planet Earth. For the rest of you, you should know that Room On Fire is not just a better album than Is This It, the band’s 2001 debut, it’s in fact a much better album, as the Strokes have transitioned from upstarts to artists so seamlessly it’s almost difficult to catch. It all starts with singer and de facto songwriter Julian Casablancas, who, amidst the pounding guitars and rhythms of his bandmates, unassumingly but forcefully stakes his place among his generation’s greatest melodists. He does this in his chorus to “Automatic Stop,” which snakes from major to minor and back with all the effortlessness of Smokey Robinson; in the sullenly hypnotic cadence of the verse in “The Way It Is;” in the simple way that the notes and phrases never seem to go where you’d expect but always sound better than you could have hoped.

From their beginnings, the Strokes have been persistently labeled by some as cheap hipster knock-offs, and while it’s heartening to think that this is due to Casablancas’ considerable gift for writing songs so catchy they sound as though we should have heard them somewhere before, it’s more likely due to petty jealousy over the band’s precocious ascent to stardom in light of their socioeconomic background. Either way it’s bunk, now more than ever. As Room On Fire demonstrates, the Strokes as a band are both far more than the sum of their influences and as formidable as any of them. Nikolai Fraiture’s nervous counterpoint bass lines evoke Bruce Thomas’ work with the Attractions of the early-80s, and Albert Hammond, Jr. and Nick Valensi weave loud guitars with an urgency belying a two-year hiatus between albums. Room On Fire’s masterpiece is the stunning “Under Control,” a gritty R&B infusion that’s as beautiful a piece of rock n roll as you’ll hear anywhere. When Casablancas soulfully urges the closing lines of the song, “You are young, darling/ Now, but not for long,” out of the reach but into the grasp of his voice, you can’t help but get the feeling that for the past 3 minutes a small part of the world has just stood still. And while the Strokes may not be the world’s greatest rock n roll band at this moment, they will be someday, and that day may come sooner than we even expect.

Originally published in Block, November 2003

How To Get To Heaven in a Box (Review of "Goodbye, Babylon")

For all its myriad peculiarities—some glorious, others odious—there is perhaps nothing in American culture so uniquely powerful and problematic than our relationship to religion. Ours is a nation which claims to be founded “under God” yet simultaneously bars Him from every approaching our government, and to this day nine out of ten Americans claim a faith in some form of divinity, with literally hundreds of sects espousing various ways in which this spirit may or may not exist. No matter where on the spectrum of belief one chooses to view it from, America’s relationship with religion proves consistently flummoxing to comprehend: ask Michael Newdow, the atheist outraged at the aforementioned “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance; then ask Roy Moore, the fundamentalist Christian judge who wishes to erect an ornate statue of the Ten Commandments in front of his Alabama courthouse.

Goodbye, Babylon, a stunning collection of American sacred music released by a fledgling Atlanta label called Dust-To-Digital, does not concern itself with attempting to untangle these paradoxes, and it’s for precisely this reason that the marvelous wooden box takes its place among the most important collections of aural Americana to ever bless our ears. Goodbye, Babylon is biblically epic in size—five full discs of music, plus a sixth disc of recorded sermons—and spans nearly forty years of musical history, from as early as 1923 up until 1960. The set is Dust-To-Digital’s maiden release, and it’s hard to imagine a more auspicious beginning, let alone such a terrifically important one. A good percentage of the hours upon hours of joyful noise found within the beautiful cedar box that houses the sextet of discs (as well as two clumps of raw cotton) has never before been available on CD, as Dust-to-Digital’s crack team of archivists and engineers painstakingly transposed much of the material from ancient 78s. The final product is a powerful reminder of just how inexorably steeped our greatest contribution to world culture—our musical tradition—is in our fiery peculiar religiosity.

In fitting with the numerous contradictions of American religion, gospel music actually took its roots from nowhere near a church, but rather from the primal isolation of the revival meetings of the Second Great Awakening. Contemporaneous to Emerson’s famous proclamation that “nature always wears the colors of the spirit” and the Transcendentalist movement of American spirituality (though thoroughly independent from it, as many revivalists were most certainly illiterate), the early-to-mid 19^th Century saw the explosion of a curiously fanatical religiosity in the American South. Revivals were the periodical conventions of this movement, and were often explicitly held as far from any trappings of civilization as possible, as one’s proximity to nature was believed to be directly related to one’s proximity to God. These meetings were often interracial, and impoverished whites and blacks would gather for days on end in a virtual carnival of righteous worship. Due to the widespread illiteracy, there were no need for prayerbooks or complicated recitations; one would often just sidle up to one’s neighbor and pick it up as they went along. This sense of communalism was never more prevalent than in the music of the meetings, during which people would scream, shout and quite literally “raise some sand,” and the joyous simplicity of the songs coupled with the exuberant vocal quality necessitated by the outdoor settings (gospel music is many things to many people, but it is never quiet) conspired to form an entirely holy ruckus unlike anything heard before.

And, of course, we’re still hearing it today, in most any music that’s ever been labeled as American, from blues to country to jazz to bluegrass to rock ‘n’ roll. Goodbye, Babylon’s greatest virtue is not its size nor its shape—though both are remarkable—but rather its incredible breadth of material, which will surely dispel any stereotypes of gospel music being tied in any way to gender, geography, or especially skin color. “She’d sing Thy Servant’s Prayer and crackers and niggers be shouting everywhere,” said Alex Bradford of Arizona Dranes, whose piano and stirring voice can be heard on three of Goodbye, Babylon’s tracks, and the collection never allows us to forget that gospel was always an art form both enjoyed and performed by whites and blacks alike, in an array of styles so dizzyingly diverse that to attempt to categorize them on racial grounds would be so woefully inadequate it barely warrants discussion. In a part of the country and in a period of time where laws were explicitly constructed to separate Americans on grounds of race, the music never stopped raging, and one need only listen to how closely Henry Owens’ tenor on the all-black Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet’s “Rock My Soul” resembles that of a young Elvis Presley (who would have been all of three years old at the time of the record’s 1938 release, yet who undoubtedly grew up in a family that would have owned scores of Golden Gate records) to realize how inescapable the racial integration of gospel was.

In the end, any attempt to write about a collection of such magnitude—both musically and historically—as Goodbye, Babylon ultimately becomes a Sisyphean endeavor, nearly as difficult as writing about God. Too much involvement in specifics seems to sacrifice the meaning of the whole, while focusing solely on the whole leads only to broad generalizations so trite they’re almost inaccurate. Dust-To-Digital has done America and the world a tremendous service, and the love that went into this set demands to be heard. Sam Phillips, legendary founder of Sun Records, once famously said of R&B and gospel music, “this is where the soul of Man never dies.” Goodbye, Babylon provides immovable evidence that indeed, it never shall.

Originally published in Block, October 2004

Rastaman Vibrations (Feature on Sacramento Kings guard Doug Christie)

“One good thing about music/ when it hits you, you feel no pain.”

-Bob Marley, “Trenchtown Rock,” 1971

If you happened to catch any of this year’s NBA Playoffs, a top-notch fashion show that occasionally deteriorated into a basketball game, you may have caught yourself paying rapt attention to Kobe Bryant’s jerseys. And I’m not talking about the purple-and-gold, either. Come on—you were riveted, as Kobe trotted out an endless array of throwback apparel in an admirable (and expensive) salute to his personal heroes. Jackie Robinson. Joe Montana. Hank Aaron. If you can’t admit it was fresh, you’re just jealous.

Though he may have been the most extravagant, Kobe wasn’t the only player saluting his heroes at this year’s Playoffs. If you’re a Sacramento Kings fan (and who the hell isn’t, save a handful of referees, apparently) you may have noticed Doug Christie, Sacto’s dynamic two-guard, in post-game interviews, rocking a simple black visor on his head with two words emblazoned on the front: “Bob Marley.” No Nike Swoosh, no hometown baseball team (granted, it’s Sacramento), no struggling dot-com. Just “Bob Marley.”

If, by chance, you recently stepped off a spaceship/submarine/time machine and that name means nothing to you, Robert Nesta Marley was reputedly born in Jamaica on February 6, 1945, and died in Miami on May 11, 1981. “Reputedly” is a necessary modifier, as there is no official record of Marley’s birth—in fact, like the island of Jamaica itself, so much of Marley’s life is steeped in tempestuous folklore that attempts to uncover anything resembling conventional “truths” can range from frustrating to utterly pointless. However, this much is truth: in the (roughly) thirty-six years he spent on this earth, Bob Marley established himself as: the most beloved and visible figure in the history of his country (and quite possibly the Caribbean as a whole); a major prophet of a sizable world religion (there are over 180,000 Rastafarians in the world today); the most active artistic voice against misery, tyranny and poverty on the African continent; and the first international superstar ever—ever—produced by the quote-unquote Third World. But most importantly Bob Marley made music. Primarily, essentially, and above all necessarily, Bob Marley made music, music that changed the world, arguably more than any musician before him and definitely more than any since. Ask Amnesty International, who use Marley’s anti-oppression classic “Get Up Stand Up” as their anthem, or any of the students at the Berhane Selassie School in Ethiopia, established by Marley and his wife for children left destitute by the Ethiopian Civil War. You can even ask those lovable progressivists in the CIA, so frightened by Marley’s influence in the Caribbean and Africa that they kept files on him for close to ten years. Chuck D is Laura Bush in comparison.

He also made music that changed lives, and thankfully still does. Doug Christie was on an airplane in 1994, during his days with the New York Knicks, when he first heard Bob. He was spacing out, writing a letter to his girl. It wasn’t the first time he had listened to him, but it was the first time he heard him, which is a distinction Doug is quick to make. “Everybody’s listening, but not everybody’s hearing him,” Christie says knowingly, and with the assured reverence of a priest who’s heard the Call, or a onetime cynic who’s found true love. “I was an occasional listener, and then all of a sudden I just heard him. I had been listening the whole time, but then one day I was like, wow.”

He pauses to let the gravity of the statement sink in, but anyone whose life has been touched by Bob Marley’s music needs no clarification. We can all remember the first time we heard Bob. For Doug Christie it was an airplane, for me it was a heartbroken teenage summer, for you it may have been at the club, on the beach, or just a balmy night on a city stoop. But it doesn’t really matter when it happened, it simply matters that it happened, and if it hasn’t yet happened to you, drop this magazine immediately and get yourself to a record store.

“I was going through a transition in my life,” Christie continues, “and Bob just came across with the love and family thing. He hit me with it—set me on a course to get married, and just changed my life in a lot of ways. First and foremost my family and my kids, my profession came second. That was the first thing that struck me with Bob, was the family thing.”

Treatises have been written conflating basketball and music, as every insecure sportswriter who strives to be down jumps at the chance to compare Iverson’s crossover dribble to Rakim’s flow, or MJ’s improvisational flair to a Coltrane sax solo. In the end it’s all pretty insufficient, because like any act of human beauty, both music and basketball are far more than the sum of their respective parts. However, it’s certainly not insufficient to suggest that music has informed basketball, simply by informing those who play it. The quiet-storm aggression of hip hop alligns itself rather nicely with a generation of ballers who grew up on BDP, Dr. Dre or Biggie Smalls, depending on where and when you’re from and exactly what your definition of “growing up” is. A gritty, whatever-it-takes competitor twice named to the NBA’s All-Defensive Team, Doug Christie’s approach to his work no more resembles the music of Bob Marley than does, say, this article you’re reading. But it’s certainly informed by it.

“I listen to Bob before games all the time,” Dough tells me emphatically. “Since I started listening to Bob, I don’t get as nervous as I used to do. I know I’m gonna do my best, and that whatever I do, I’m gonna try as hard as I can. It’s helped my basketball in the sense that I don’t worry about it as much. Bob teaches us how to get at what’s real about life. Helps me keep my priorities straight, you know? These are the things I want to do, but what are the things I need to do?”

There exists an unfortunate and despicably ignorant misconception that reggae music is “drug music,” and that Bob Marley was essentially a sublimely talented pothead who made music to get high to. This, of course, is ridiculous, and disrespectful both to Marley himself and the highly demanding and complex tenets of the Rastafarian faith. When I ask Doug about the susceptibility of a Marley-loving basketball star (already a stigma-laden profession in regards to marijuana use, thank you, Mr. Oakley) to unsavory suppositions, he bristles understandably.

“Stereotypes, sure, that’s fair to say. I’m sure that people stereotype me all the time. I never let that limit me, though, because I live for my family and no one else. I don’t judge anyone, and that’s another thing I’ve learned from Bob’s music, because he was judged all his life. No one has the right to judge another person unfairly. And if you think Bob was about weed, you don’t even know what the man was trying to say, so it only makes sense that you’d try to judge me. In the end I just don’t care.”

Bob Marley’s songs have a timeless and stunning universality—you can go anywhere in the world and bond with people over “Bob,” as the music eminates unity of the rarest, most magnificent form. Bob Marley sang songs of revolution, songs of love, songs of God and songs of freedom, often all in the same breath. Of all the beauties in Marley’s music, this unity is undoubtedly the most rewarding. “I look at Bob as a sort of sphere,” says Christie. “His music was so well-rounded. Some music you listen to just because the beat is real nice—he had melody, he had verbal skills, the heart and soul he put into the music, you can get lost in all of that, just because of the beauty. He covered the spectrum; there’s not a higher or lower with him. He was a genius. There’s certain people, certain things in life that cover it all. Bob did that in his music.”

Enough said. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go throw on my copy of Burnin’, even though after all these years it’s scratched to shit.

(Doug Christie’s favorite Bob Marley album is Exodus, followed closely by Talkin’ Blues).

Originally published in Dime, November 2002

"Diary from Texas" (SXSW Festival Coverage)

THURSDAY, MARCH 14

My initiation to the 2002 South By Southwest Music Festival—Austin, Texas’ annual feeding and breeding ground for the world’s most diverse and formidable musical talent—came at the hands of an Icelandic hip-hop outfit. It’s a strange world in which we live, to be sure. As I stood in the crowd at La Zona Rosa, unsure of whether I was there in earnest or in irony, I was nonetheless intrigued by Quarashi, a group of young Reykjavikians(??) whose raison d’etre seems to be early-90s era Beastie Boys records. The kids hit the stage, and though the imitation proved impressive, Quarashi’s ponderously derivative sound and lyrical non-content soon left most members of the audience (myself included) pining away for nothing more than a pair headphones and our old cassette copy of “Check Your Head.” A valiant effort, but a needless one.

Quarashi’s fate as a festival casualty was sealed when legendary New York scratch crew the X-Ecutioners took the La Zona Rosa stage at 11. DJs Rob Swift, Rock Raida, and Total Eclipse set the party off with a breathtaking hour on the ones and twos, treating a capacity crowd to a dizzying crash-course in the fine art of turntablism. Effortlessly combining showmanship with virtuosity, the X-men had the crowd in the palm of their hand from the first time needles touched wax, assaulting material as divergent as Missy Elliot’s “Get Ur Freak On” to LL Cool J’s classic “Rock The Bells.” By the time the trio had left the stage, there wasn’t a dry eye in the hip-hop loving house.

Wondering if Rob Swift and the boys had already shot my evening—let alone my weekend—I moseyed (when in Rome…) on over to Antone’s for the 1am performance of Alabama rock quintet Drive-By Truckers. As the Truckers took the stage before a jam-packed house, however, my worries of anti-climax were resoundingly dispelled. Delivering the smartest Southern rock this side of Steve Earle with the intensity of Highway To Hell-era AC/DC, Drive-By Truckers put on as compelling and powerful a live show as today’s music world has to offer. The word on the street is Lynyrd Skynyrd with bad-ass brains, but the river runs far deeper—the Truckers channel Southern musical tradition through an indefatigable conscience and sensibility that manages to embrace, castigate, and ultimately transcend the culture that spawned it. Between the X-Ecutioners and Drive-By Truckers, my knees were so weak I’m surprised I made it back to my hotel at the end of the evening.

FRIDAY, MARCH 15

Friday found me returning to La Zona Rosa for the 8pm performance of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Armed with nothing more than a five-song EP and a deafening buzz, the bass-less trio of Brooklyn kids proved that youth can (and should) be a wonderful thing in the realm of rock and roll. Despite a set that clocked in at under a half and hour, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs fulfilled the expectations of the crowd with an ultra-original blend of angular punk and rockstar stage presence. The show’s climax was the perverse power-ballad “Our Time,” as frontwoman Karen O worked the crowd into a frenzy with a shimmering piece of anthemic punk grandeur that has cult-classic written all over it.

An hour or so later I wandered into Austin Music Hall, SXSW’s largest indoor venue, in anticipation of Starsailor, Britain’s latest batch of pop-rock boy wonders. After much fanfare, the band hit the stage and treated their audience to a fantastic hour of sweeping minor-key ballads mixed with, well, sweeping major-key ballads. Frontman James Walsh’s voice is otherworldly, and though no one would accuse Starsailor of being the most versatile or original band in the world today, there is little doubt about the power of their material or their ability to perform it in a way that combines boyish introspection with epic levels of rock grandeur. Arena-rock isn’t dead—it’s just a little shy, and there’s nothing wrong with that. After Starsailor, my night sadly deteriorated into an unfortunate odyssey of barhopping and crummy hardcore bands. Even in Austin, it seems, you can’t win ‘em all, but I realized that I was coming fairly close.

SATURDAY, MARCH 16

By Saturday evening I was gloriously exhausted, but still managed to cart myself to—where else—La Zona Rosa for the Biz3 Publicity Showcase. I arrived just in time to catch Atlanta-based beatsmith Scott Herren, better known to fans as Prefuse 73. The beats were interesting, but the show just wasn’t, as Herren’s obscure ambient hip-hop seemed to confuse and alienate a crowd desperately in search of accessibility.

After Prefuse 73, things were knocked up a notch—but not much further—by the MC tandem of Mr. Lif and Aesop Rock. Lif—a legend of the Boston hip hop scene—showed a knack for firing up the crowd, but too often the blaze was extinguished by the two performers’ lack of compelling or catchy material. To paraphrase the recent musings of a notable MC, it takes an anthem to get our damn hands up, and Lif and Rock came with nothing of the sort. And though the rhymes sounded cool, they only ran the gamut between the pretentious and the downright meaningless, often straying into territory so comically abstract that Kool Keith himself would wince.

All previous disappointments were erased, however, by the arrival of New York-based experimentalists Antipop Consortium. Antipop Consortium played the most daring and ambitious show I saw in my time at SXSW, the sort of performance that leaves an audience dazzlingly disoriented but nonetheless craving more. Trotting out a variety of mixers and bizarre synthesizers, APC proceeded to manufacture their own spacey but hypnotic beats while rapping over them with competence and confidence, with an effect of Stetsasonic-meets-the-Orb-via-KRS-One. Endlessly evocative but still uncategorizable, APC provided a fitting swansong to my three days of beer, barbeque, and rock and roll. There is exciting, innovative, and compelling music being made in the world today, and you don’t even necessarily have to go to Austin to find it. But take it from me, it’s lots more fun that way.

Originally published online at Papermag.com, March 2002

Conor Oberst (Profile)

As consumers of art, one of our fondest delusions is that our artists are driven by a mad and insatiable compulsion to create, an inexplicable necessity to constantly expose themselves to our own prying eyes and ears. Of course, equivalent to our desire to believe this myth is our jilted and cynical resignation that most of the time, it simply isn’t the case, lest R. Kelly might spend his time making R&B recordings of questionable taste as opposed to video recordings of, er, unquestionable taste. So when a baby-faced indie-rock heartthrob from Omaha, Nebraska looks us in the face and tells us, “The few times in my life that I’ve had writer’s block have been the most horrible times—I need to write songs in order to feel normal and function, to exist in a way that’s normal,” we can perhaps be excused if we smile awkwardly and drop our eyes in mistrust.

But if we hear him out, we’ll be better for it. Conor Oberst hails from a musical family—his brother Matt is a member of the North Carolina-based Sorry About Dresden, and his father was a part-time musician (his mother, incidentally, is an elementary school principal). Conor has been writing and recording his own music since he was a prepubescent, started his own record label (the now-formidable Omaha outfit Saddle Creek Records) at age twelve, and since 1996 has been the creative mastermind behind the critically-lauded singer-songwriter vehicle known as Bright Eyes. Both his work with Bright Eyes and his label have spearheaded nothing short of a musical explosion out of Omaha over the past several years, helping close friends such as The Faint and Cursive gain considerable national attention and acclaim. And just to show he hasn’t gotten bored, 2001 saw the debut of Oberst’s hard-rocking side project, Desaparecidos, as well as the release of that band’s stellar first album, the Read Music/Speak Spanish. Now, at the hardened age of 22, Conor Oberst is set to vault himself further into the indie spotlight with the release of Bright Eyes’ fourth full-length studio album, the breathtaking Lifted or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground. If all of this doesn’t strike you as compulsive artistic behavior, your standards may be a bit too high.

One of the brightest talents in a generation of performers burdened by the cachet of “Emo” (rock’s latest empty prefix, for those tired of keeping track), Conor Oberst’s knack for songwriting is staggering, as evidenced by his prolific output. However, as was the case with Dylan, Westerberg, Cobain, and the rest of Bright Eyes’ forebearers in the angsty cult of Young Men Too Smart For Their Own Good, the truth of the matter lies in the performance, where Oberst’s trembling voice tears and frays its way through his own gorgeous melodies. The music bursts with a simple and heartfelt legitimacy, and hurls indie rock’s growing by-the-scenesters-for-the-scenesters aesthetic towards the trash heap where it belongs. “In my mind, at the end of the day it’s just music, it’s just writing songs and playing them for people,” says Oberst, in regards to empty categorizations and affiliations. “The whole circus that’s attached to it is a necessary evil. I’ve learned as I go to navigate those things and to not let them bum me out too much. I’ve felt frustration with that in the past, but now I just let the music speak for itself.”

“The thing I’m most proud of in terms of what I’ve been able to accomplish is the group of friends I’ve had, and what we’ve been able to do. With songwriting I’m a little self-conscious of it all, and I’m not going to go out and say ‘my songs are sweet’ or anything. But in regards to my friends, I can honestly say I’m proud as shit that we’ve basically been able to do what we’ve done apart from any bullshit, on our own terms.”

While Bright Eyes began as a stripped-down showcase for a young man’s songwriting precocity, the project has grown larger and more ambitious as Oberst has grown into his considerable muses. 2000’s acclaimed Fevers And Mirrors found Bright Eyes moving towards a fuller, more elaborate sound, a reach he claims has culminated with Lifted…. “It‘s very much a pre-meditated move to make the most enormous sound we possibly can, in terms of layers of instruments and stuff. We’d sort of been moving in that direction—each album had been more and more orchestrated. I guess we just decided that it would just be one more step up, as big as we could get. From here on out, I think the next record will be much more minimal, just because after this there’s really nowhere else to go.”

That’s not entirely true—there are plenty of places to go, and listening to Conor Oberst discover them is an exciting prospect indeed.

Originally published in Paper, September 2002

Jazzyfatnastees: “The Tortoise And The Hare" (Review)

One of the more problematic pitfalls of the recent “neo-Soul” movement has been an ever-increasing level of self-consciousness, as preoccupation with genre and tradition can easily lead to music that is at best boring, at worst painfully self-important. The Tortoise and The Hare, the sophomore full-length from Philly-based duo Jazzyfatnastees, is neither a boring album nor a self-important one, and despite occasional lapses into the formulaic and pretentious, it comes closer to greatness than most R&B albums you’re likely to hear all year. Part of this may be due to the fact that Tracey Moore and Mercedes Martinez seem content to lovingly reside in each other’s shadows, keeping the vocals tight and eliminating the danger of hyper-introspective star trips (see Lauryn Hill Unplugged). Part of it may be due to the strength of the songs, as “Something In The Way” is a stunning piece of pop-R&B and twisted guitar riffs lace “Compelled” with a healthy dose of Prince-ish poison. And part of it may simply be due to the fact that Jazzees’ soaring harmonies are infected with a refined sense of joy and emotional purpose that is far more the essence of great Soul music than flashy clothes and tired name-dropping. The Tortoise and The Hare may not be a perfect record, but it’s a very good one, and in the end does nothing more—or less—than make us want to keep listening.

Originally published in Paper, October 2002

Coldplay: “A Rush of Blood To The Head” (Review)

The “sophomore slump” is a dreaded proposition for any band, especially one that burst into the hearts and radios of millions with a wildly successful debut album, and for this reason, purportedly, Coldplay’s A Rush Of Blood To The Head fell victim to an interminable mixing process and countless delays. Folks tend to get antsy in Mother England, though, where Coldplay have ascended to Britpop royalty in the two years since Parachutes, and consequently the band’s impending demise has been the subject of more rumors than that dreamy Prince William. Coldplay say bollocks to this, and maybe the lads are on the level, but Rush Of Blood is a sadly disappointing album that smacks suspiciously of a band trying hard to escape itself. “Politik” is empty minor-key murk that plods more than it rocks, and tracks like “The Scientist” and “Whispers” range only from the uninsipired to the damn-near unlistenable. Gaudy production touches attempt (unsuccessfully) to flatter the skimpy material, and such ornate grandiosities as “Clocks” and “Daylight” may soon find their way into car commercials, but not into the heads of listeners. Rush Of Blood isn’t a complete wash—“In My Place” and “Green Eyes” are awfully pretty tunes, but both lack the poise that made Parachutes’ “Yellow” a pop-radio anthem for the ages. Coldplay may continue to insist that reports of death have been greatly exaggerated, but A Rush Of Blood To The Head has denied them that rarest of luxuries: the chance to go out on top.

Originally published in Paper, September 2002

Flaming Lips: “Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots” (Review)

Three years removed from 1999’s critically-adored The Soft Bulletin, the Flaming Lips have re-emerged in the 21^st Century with a collection of decidedly pretty songs concerning love, loss, spiritual insecurity and robots. Bellicose pink robots, precisely. Still reading? Good, because the Lips will have you know that Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots is not the dreaded “concept album”—that most empty of all art-rock cliches—and for this we should be thankful, because Yoshimi’s many finer moments are found when the band abandons its suspect sci-fi storyline and sticks to its undeniable knack for quirky humanity. “Fight Test” and “Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell” lace gorgeous and insistent pop melody through even-more-gorgeous and insistent space-funk, while the exquisite ballad “Do You Realize?” reminds us that the Lips still rank among pop’s most gifted songsmiths. And though Yoshimi contains plenty of trademark sonic meanderings (some more charming than others), and the robot situation never far off, it is Wayne Coyne’s voice—always witty but never affected—that rescues Yoshimi from ever approaching obscure pretension.

Originally published in Paper, August 2002