Review Summary: Conor Oberst is a treatise on what Conor does best: folk/rock at its most earnest, introspective, and musically accomplished.
Conor Oberst has been the heart and soul of Bright Eyes since he was but a wee emo teen, and despite short-lived side ventures like Park Ave. and Desaparecidos, Bright Eyes has been, for all intents and purposes, Oberst’s main musical vehicle. Now finally ducking out from under that weighted alias, Omaha’s preeminent songwriter has (technically) struck out on his own with the aid of the Mystic Valley Band, a name that sounds like it came straight from a tent revival. Conor has always been a chameleonic musician, switching from punk rock to orchestral pop to squawking electronica on various projects, but Conor Oberst is a treatise on what Conor does best: folk/rock at its most earnest, introspective, and musically accomplished.
“Cape Canaveral” starts out the record in the vein of 2005’s I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, a simple acoustic melody framing Oberst’s typically sharp lyrics beseeching “hey hey hey mother interstate / can you deliver me from evil?” Conor and the band traveled down to Mexico to record this album, and evidently the southern climate paid off, giving much of the record an abnormally relaxed vibe when taken in context with Oberst’s other work.
“Sausalito” is a shuffling, optimistic country-rock tune about running away from the modern world, a common theme on an album that, above all else, celebrates the highway and the allure of American back roads. “Moab” is the best example of this, a pulsing guitar-rock with a dash of country spice that wouldn’t sound out of place on Cassadaga. When Oberst triumphantly announces, “there’s nothing that the road cannot heal,” by then you’re having too much fun to disagree with him either way.
Lyrically Oberst is in top form, dropping sepia-toned images like “hear the Mustangs rev at the four way stop / you get ghosted when the light says go” on the anthemic “Get-Well-Cards” and painting a vivid pictures of the mind like “patterns in my mind now moving slow / sorrow all across the surface roads / smoothing out the edges of the stone / the lights are out, where’d everybody go?” on the beautifully dark “Lenders in the Temple.”
Lyrics mean nothing without a solid backing track to flesh out the thoughts, and Oberst and his band don’t disappoint. The bouncy guitars and tinkling piano on “Danny Callahan” contrast with the tragic subject matter, highlighting the potential for joy in the midst of grief. Bluegrass boogie rave-up “I Don’t Want To Die (In A Hospital)” is one of the most urgent songs Oberst has ever recorded, a track that fairly explodes with energy, conjuring up a ridiculous image of Oberst rocking some country bar in the backwoods of Georgia. If there’s ever been a better argument for living out your last days rather than wasting away in a bed, I haven’t heard it.
Oberst has been getting more and more consistent with his offerings over the years, but with the sheer amount of ideas he has, there are always bound to be a few that never truly work out. “NYC-Gone, Gone,” Oberst takes a simple American foot-stompin,’ hand-clappin’ beat and electrifies it with a stick-in-your-head chorus that inexplicably ends shortly after the minute mark. “Valle Mistico (Ruben’s Song)” is a fairly pointless instrumental break that serves only to stunt the album’s momentum.
But these are trifling problems, and the one-two punch of “Souled Out!!!” and “Milk Thistle” that closes out the record forgives any transgressions. The former is the sound of a band that sounds like they could keep playing music for eternity with a grin on their faces and a laugh in their throats, a bar-band sing-a-long with a roaring guitar and pounding drums, while the latter is a gentle acoustic strummer in the tradition of “Lime Tree” with some of the album’s best lyrics: “I keep death at my heels / like a basset hound / if I go to heaven, I’ll be bored as hell / like a crying baby at the bottom of a well.” Simple and startlingly effective, it ends the record on one of many peaks.
If Conor needed to prove to anyone that he could survive and, more importantly, succeed outside of the confines of Bright Eyes, his work with the Mystic Valley Band should go a long way to putting any doubts to rest. He’s not exactly the Bob Dylan of the millennial generation yet, but he’s pretty far on his way.
