Coner Oberst - 'Upside Down Mountain' (Nonesuch)
Excerpt from the David Bevan article Spin:
At a Brooklyn
benefit show in the fall of 2004, to raise money to pay legal fees for those
arrested during the protests of the Republican National Convention at Madison
Square Garden, I remember him stopping in the middle of a song, to remind a
singing audience, that, "This isn't a Dashboard Confessional show. How
about I sing the songs and you listen?" He'd later apologize upon
finishing, say he'd just found it distracting, that the same audience
relationship that worked for Chris Carrabba, a perceived contemporary, did not
work for him. By that point, he'd taken on the mantle of serious folk singer,
of someone who was attempting to leave that perception of who he was behind
him. It's been a challenge since. Perhaps more than any major songwriter in
recent memory, Oberst has struggled to shed skins as well as his heroes. He's
been cast as a mope, a ponce, a prodigy, an alcoholic, a fraud, a dilettante, a
loud-mouthed liberal, a sexual predator, the voice of his generation, Winona
Ryder bait — his first impression strong. "I'm like a person who wants to
be a chameleon, but is a bad one," he says. "I think I'm pretty much
always recognizable, even if I think I'm in costume. But I still like to get
into costumes. It makes me feel like I'm trying new things, even if another
person can listen and go, 'Oh, there he is again.'" - David Bevan (Spin)
“Hopefully
you’ll get something new from it every time you listen to it, you’ll hone in on
something different,” Thought said. “It’s short enough to do that, to take in,
to digest in one sitting, so to speak. I think right now it’s at maybe 34
minutes; there may be one or two musical things added on to the record that I
know is the record at this point. But I don’t think it will be any longer than
36 or 37 minutes in its entirety. So in that, it’s short enough to digest, but
it’s gonna be dense. So dense that maybe in one sitting you’ll listen to it and
only listen to the piano and string arrangements, and then you’ll listen to it
again and you’ll get into the actual words that are being said, and you’ll
listen again and get into some of the other musicality. There’s very many
layers to this record, but it doesn’t take place over very much time.” - Black Thought (Dan Rys article XXL Mag.)
“Her best
strokes balance the chemical reactions of inventive imagery and dark secrets
that come back to haunt her. But it’s nothing that she can’t defeat. The
instrumental performance, assisted at different points by members of The
Strokes, Queens of the Stone Age, Warpaint, and others, incorporates a few new
tricks into her electric intensity to make things interesting, as on the
mariachi guitar conclusion of “Underworld”. Dalle shines brightest through her
poetic hand, as on “Blood in Gutters”: “Killing us slow, chemical wrath/ So
suffer the madness, cling to the birth/ Of a new era, to hell with our worth.”
Her vocals are relentless here, drawing near-exclusive focus, the rocker’s
recovery seeming deceptively easy.” – Sam Willett (Consequence Of Sound)
“With blurred
lines connecting all different subgenres of country music, it’s often hard to
know where to start. But fans of americana/roots rock/singer-songwriter genres
have an entry point for bluegrass with Chatham County Line. The band’s lead
singer Dave Wilson has put together another stellar set of songs that include,
but are not limited to, traditional bluegrass instruments (banjo, mandolin,
fiddle, banjo, and bass). The band is not afraid to show off its instrumental
chops too. They have the sound of one microphone. Where instruments and voices
fade in and out of the spotlight as needed. They blend together and stand apart
when necessary.” - Jeff McMahon (Twangville.com)
What will you be buying this week...
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