IT AIN'T HIM BABE
Pining for new rock heroes, clueless critics anoint such unworthy artists as Bright Eyes
By Chris Morris
My friend Jack is an avid and amused reader of Our Friendly Local Daily Pop Music Critic (familiarly, OFLDPMC). Many is the Sunday I've received an early afternoon call from Jack, who will rail about OFLDPMC's incessant comparisons of some promising new talent to Bob Dylan. Sometimes he will count the number of paragraphs before that first, inevitable Dylan reference.
Lately, OFLDPMC's been rubbing Dylan up against Conor Oberst, the singer-songwriter who records under the rubric Bright Eyes. Fortunately, OFLDPMC did not unload a Zimmerman name-check this week in the second part of his serialized review of Bright Eyes' double-barreled new release, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn (both Saddle Creek). But dear ol' Bob has been trotted out endlessly - in an initial review of I'm Wide Awake two weeks ago; in a write-up of the "single," "Lua," from the same album; and in a breathless diptych rhapsody about Oberst and another OFLDPMC favorite, Jack White of the White Stripes.
Let's nip this in the bud, shall we? Let's put Oberst, now 24, on one side of the critical scale, and the 24-year-old Dylan on the other, and see who's carrying the real weight.
By the time Dylan turned 24, he had released his first five albums, which included such compositions as "Blowin' in the Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'," "Chimes of Freedom," "My Back Pages," "She Belongs to Me," "Mr. Tambourine Man," and "Subterranean Homesick Blues." In his 24th year, he would merely complete Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, winding up a four-year metamorphosis from Woody Guthrie imitator to rock visionary and the most important singer-songwriter of his time.
And Oberst? Despite his penchant for loooonnng albums like 2002's Lifted and his rep, developed over a half-dozen albums since 1998, as a prolific, prodigious writer (shared by another overpraised OFLDPMC fave, Ryan Adams), he doesn't sport the muscle to win in a cage match with Dylan. Memorable or anthemic songs? Um, no. Any hits outside of the increasingly oxygen-free universe of indie rock? Nah. The musical standard-bearer of his generation? Beyond the delusions of certain writers with a weakness for autohypnosis, unh-unh.
On that point, I rest my case.
Some scribes who are easily impressed by high output, or those nearing retirement age with a need to appear "with it," will unleash predictable torrents of rapture for Oberst's latest record-spew - two albums (one folkish in orientation, the other muddled rock) that clock out at 95 minutes total. Having spent a large chunk of a couple afternoons slogging through these works, I am not buying.
I'm Wide Awake is definitely the better of the pair; its relatively modest flavor and simple but hardly indelible Dylanesque readymades ("First Day of My Life" = "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright," "Another Travelin' Song" = "Lily, Rosemary & the Jack of Hearts") are easy to swallow. Digital Ash, on the other hand, is often risibly overproduced by Mike Mogis: We really do not need another version of "Kashmir" in the guise of "Down in a Rabbit Hole." Both records, with their gushers of strings, brass, and acoustic instruments, display the same overbearing, overreaching approach one sees in Bright Eyes' big-band concert onslaughts. In the music, as with the performer, it's too much, too soon.
It's too bad that Oberst and such other ardently admired, hyped-to-death newcomers as Franz Ferdinand and the Arcade Fire are being weighted down with glory before they've come close to bursting out of their derivative cocoons. These acts are being spit out and ground up by the desperate machinery of a strangulating music business that's panting for new heroes in an epoch where there is no true vanguard. It will take more than vast reams of ineffectual song from a wobbly-voiced young'un like Oberst, and concurrent reams of press releases from overworked indie-label flacks and swooning clips from clueless hacks, to get music's pulse racing again.Published: 01/27/2005
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