rehearsing my choir says:
What would you do if you were captured by wild bunnies ans enslaved?
{Med57} Mood: pretentious says:
Eat them
Now that we have that queer moment out of the way, I believe it is now time to introduce you to
Lifted or the Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground. Now what, you may be questioning, would inspire someone to give an album such a claustrophobic and pretentious name? For this particular question, I have no answers, but what I can tell you is that the title of this album is a rather brief summary of the music itself. Really,
Lifted or the Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground is 13 tracks of sprawling narrative-upon-narrative songwriting; an all-encompassing novella filled to the brim with ideas and musical landscapes. The liner booklet itself is 28 pages, struggling to ever fit within the jewel case, and one page lists the musicians and their instruments in detail. This may not seem like something astounding, until you consider that there are about 38 musicians present on the album, including Conor Oberst himself.
Lifted or the Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, although pertaining to the original Bright Eyes sound that had been repeated throughout their earlier years, represents a huge leap in compositional skill and songwriting. While previous albums such as
Letting Off the Happiness and
Fevers & Mirrors tended to show a lack of musical ability or innovation at times, this certainly is not the case here. The vast array of instruments and musicians present on the album (clarinet, piano, cello, harmonica, french horn, bassoon, trumpet, violen, flute, electric guitar, acoustic guitar, keyboards, bass, banjo, bells, hammer dulcimer, vibraphone, glockenspiel, mandolin, dobro, pedal steel, oboe, rhodes, organ, drums, vocals and choirs) not only give the songs a sense of unity and brotherhood, but also a fine musical backdrop and plenty of subtle nuances that make the songs much more interesting to listen to with headphones.
However, the instrumentation and arrangements aren't the only aspects that make
Lifted or the Story is in the Soil, Kep Your Ears to the Ground so great. Conor Oberst, the core of the group, is the chief songwriter and arranger. Bob Dylan comparisons pop up at the thought of Bright Eyes, and this in large is due to his style of songwriting. Although many of the songs contain massive hooks and an overall listenability, the songs are often without a true chorus. Instead, verse follows verse, with a great sense of metaphors, imagery, and linguistic beauty that has been associated with folk genre for as long as anyone can remember. Like most artists lumped in the singer-songwriter genre, Conor Oberst tends to stumble when he gets in over his head, which is evident on the rough-edged acoustic jarble of "Waste of Paint", the only point in the album where he seems to not know what exactly he is doing, and the lack of confidence shows through the vocals and uninspired and boring lyrical scope. The purpose of life, death, loneliness, friendship, love, war, the media, and just about everything within what you could scrounge up. "The Big Picture", as it's name blatantly details, is a summary of all of the ideals represented on the rest of the album. The song, however, stumbles at an overbearingly long 8 minutes, but becomes better over time as the sound quality goes from cheap-Casio to a much more refined. "Method Acting" and "False Advertising" (the latter a gorgeous, string-laden waltz) detail the downfalls of recognition and the manipulation from cetain media outlets. Media sure gets dumped on a lot throughout the album, including the barn-burning folk rock anthem and closer "Lets Not *** Ourselves", where raceous and thundering musical accompaniments go hand in hand with pissed-off lyrics attacking everything in sight ("NBC, ABC, CBS- bull***!"), but is also shows a concern for the future of mankind (like "Don't Know When but a Day is Gonna Come", an dreary death-march of dramatic horns and strings), but also the current political climate ("While the poison ink spews from a speech writer's pen, he knows he don't have to say it, so it don't bother him"), one of the strongest points of the song. Oh, and that
organ solo!!!
While the breezy piano-pop of "Bowl of Oranges" provides a hope for a much lyrically and musically lighter album,
Lifted.. never really gives you many chances to breath in it's squall of linear anthems. The only other tune that comes anywhere close to the cheer of "Bowl of Oranges" is the jaunting "You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will?". Although it turns out to be a depiction of attachment ("You are a boomerang, you see. You will return to me"), the last minute or so turns into a shout-along chorus of "You will?", an optimistic and vague question at the most, though the mood is ruined by the following "Love I Don't Have to Love", a loud, bass-thumping song of banging a prostitute. Go figure. "Make War" is perhaps one of the best songs on the album, thought criminally ignored by reviewers alike. Driven by countryesque guitar strums and pedal-steel, Conor sings of Man's ongoing war with himself, and how war itself seperates family and loved ones from each other, but somehow the meaning tends to be lost in the pedal-steel country shuffle and overall optimistic tone, ending on an a-cappella sing-along of "Hurry up and run to the one that you love. And tie him up in your likeness. And he'll become, become the prisoner that I was. And you know all that has spoiled in my heart". And that is easily one of the best moments on the whole album.
Conor Oberst certainly is no Bob Dylan, but I'd pet him.
