Published April 25, 2005, in Erasing Clouds

Reviews by Matthew Webber

Bright Eyes
I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning
Saddle Creek

I could do without the drugs, obsessive fans, and flings with infamous shoplifters. But, in one aspect, I wish I were Bright Eyes' maestro Conor Oberst: Jesus, this kid can write lyrics!

In a different century, sometime before recorded sound, Oberst would have been a now-anthologized poet, scribbling his verses with quills instead of typewriters. (Indeed, the Nebraskan wonder boy's legend has grown so urbanized, I've heard he types his lyrics. It's so good a myth, I don't care whether it's real. I don't care whether he invented it just to have something to sing about in "Another Travelin' Song.")

Had this mythical Oberst followed Axl Rose's kilt-wearing forebears, I have no doubt that he, too, would have been so prodigious as to release his Use Your Illustrated Manuscripts I and II on the same day. Instead of reinterpreting Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," which he does today (on "Road to Joy"), he might have inspired it. Or at least he would have courted some wenches.

But, as a 21st century analog boy, the poetry most accessible to Oberst and his fans is the poetry of rock critics who weave their metaphors as clumsily as, um, clumsy rock critics. It's been easy for them to praise Oberst's last decade of work with Bright Eyes and innumerable other side projects, beginning in his puberty, as that of the latest New Dylan, but harder for them to make non-Saddle Creek (the Nebraska-based indie label) aficionados buy it. Having heard his voice as whiny and knowing Oberst more as yet another Winona Ryder paramour than as a musician, I stayed away from the kid with the sad, bright eyes.

Until 2005, that is, when Oberst pulled a Nelly by dropping two albums on the same day, a feat that inspired fawning profiles in at least three major music magazines, Entertainment Weekly, and USA Today, so I couldn't even escape the dude at the dentist.

To listeners like myself just now discovering Oberst's story/songs of alcoholic insomnia and bleary-eyed, only-living-boy-in-New York nightwalking, the acoustic half of Bright Eyes' double play, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, is an album to be read, bursting like one of Oberst's own bursting wildflowers (in "Old Soul Song (For the New World Order)") with imagery and metaphors.

"Stars that clear have been dead for years," sings Oberst, "but the idea still lives on." (In "We Are Nowhere and It's Now.") Here's another snapshot: "All the way home held your camera like a bible, just wishing so bad that it held some kind of truth." (Again, in "Old Soul Song.") Taken out of context, these words might lose their brightness, but hidden among other gems, they shine.

The music on the album teems with alt-country trappings: harmonica, pedal steel, mandolin, Emmylou Harris' singing harmony. All of which makes Oberst the most Dylan-est New Dylan yet, with those labyrinthine lyrics and a voice that emotes so painfully it's sometimes painful to listen to. I react to Oberst exactly as I react to Dylan: I respect and appreciate his obvious talent without completely loving it. Without more memorable melodies, I can't be the fan whose only non-Hawaiian shirts he owns are concert T-shirts with his favorite musician's photo. (A true story.)

Oberst is clearly a more prolific and poetic songwriter than I am. In a word, he's better, and I never would claim otherwise. Perhaps he's better at singer/songwriting than I am at writing anything, you might say. But, although I dream of singing songs to an audience reading lyric sheets instead of watching me sit on a stool, I also dream of sticking my songs in their heads.

Months after I bought my first Bright Eyes album, not enough of Oberst's songs are stuck.

But I still pore over those liner notes.

Beck
Guero
Interscope

A one-time New Dylan himself, Beck's lyrics mostly have been meaningless. The tag applied more to his capturing the zeitgeist (another phrase only found in arts and entertainment articles) in a song like "Loser" than for his lines about "getting crazy with the Cheez Whiz."

Plus, like Dylan, Beck plays the acoustic guitar, doesn't have an operatic singing voice, and reinvents himself with each new album. Although, with Beck, the reinvention can sound more like an overcorrection from each previous album, as he veers from genre-stealing white-boy funk to atmospheric white-boy blues and back again, from Odelay to Mutations to Midnite Vultures to Sea Change.

In Beck's most important work, or at least the most critically lionized, Odelay, Beck switched personalities from song to song or sometimes even from verse to chorus, which, paradoxically, seems to signify to anyone who lists this album as one of last decade's best that it also is his most consistent work, even though two later albums persisted in just one idea: sex (Midnite Vultures) and all the mornings after (Sea Change).

As fresh as Beck's alleged masterpiece sounded when it came out, I can't argue too forcefully against its greatness or "best"-ness. But I'll never argue it's my favorite. I listen to Midnite Vultures and Sea Change more often, especially the latter, whose picturesque lyrics - believe it or not - and warm, enveloping production remind me of girls I, too, have loved and lost and possibly still love even though I know they are lost to me forever. The record has the added charm of being the right one at the right time in my life, making it to me what Blood on the Tracks was to any broken-up music critic five years before I was born.

I'd even argue it's one of the top-five records this decade, and that Beck is one of my top-ten artists of all time, just because I share an irresistible urge to argue and quantify my favorites with fellow music geeks and other people who don't have anything better to do. (I suspect these people are this review's target audience.)

All this is to say that Beck's new album, Guero, isn't my favorite Beck album, nor will it be remembered as his best, as Beck mostly veers away from the melancholia of Sea Change all the way back to the hip-hop pastiches of Odelay. Depending on how decade-defining you found that album, Guero is either Beck's most or least consistent work in three albums.

Lead singles "E-Pro" and "Hell Yes" (at least on college radio, they're singles) and the vast majority of songs on the album are as funky as anything you'd expect out of tracks that feature a Beastie Boys' sample, Jack White, handclaps, and production by past, present, and probably future Beck (and Beastie) collaborators The Dust Brothers; as funky as anything by a white person.

The reason for the schizophrenic happiness in Beck's new songs is simple: He got married and had a baby, not that you'd know by most of these song's lyrics. In fact, "Girl" and "Missing," if you want, can be about murder and suicidal tendencies, respectively, with lines like, um, "I'm gonna make her die," and "I prayed heaven today would bring its hammer down and pound you out of my head." That's more New Cash than New Dylan.

But just when I thought "Hell Yes" was the cleverest rap song since "Subterranean Homesick Blues," a harmonica solo kicked in, thereby proving it: Beck isn't the New Dylan, because that's an idiotic term.

But "My beat is correct" should become a new catchphrase.

And Beck, as indescribable as he is as a musician, might already be someone whose older music I have more fun describing, and listening to, than his new stuff, judging by this review. He might be my Prince, David Bowie, or Tori Amos (except I already have one of her). I want to continue relating to Beck, while he wants to play songs as different from his last batch as those songs were to the ones that came before, none of which were worse than decent, most of which I love, but all of which mean less to me than everything on Sea Change. But asking for a sequel would be asking Beck not to be Beck, at least until he writes his next album.

Yet Guero might be the most interesting album I've heard so far this year, and I mean that in a good way, not in an, "Oh, that's interesting" way, as no other album released in 2005 has made me laugh and tap the steering wheel concurrently. I'm only disappointed because it follows a masterpiece. If Guero had come out in the mid-'90s instead of the Beck albums that did, its songs would still sound fresh. In the mid-'00s, they sound like Beck's first repeated ideas, which I admit I still prefer to those of most troubadours and rappers.

Meet the New Beck, same as the Old Beck.

The Mars Volta
Frances the Mute
Universal

Seldom have I cared less about lyrics than I do on the new The Mars Volta album.

The progressive (as in prog rock) half of disbanded post-rock heroes At The Drive In, The Mars Volta's two main authors, guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and singer Cedric Bixler Zavala, have crafted a Pink Floyd-style concept album about disconnected humanity. I think. The five suites on Frances the Mute, with names like "Cygnus... Vismund Cygnus" and "Miranda That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore," are comprised of shorter musical sections, themselves with names like "Umbilical Syllables" and "Multiple Spouse Wounds," that are alternatingly mute and deafness-inducing.

This is the music Radiohead should make, and also the music they shouldn't, not with that band's infrequently used gift of songcraft. The Mars Volta hasn't written anything as beautiful as "Fake Plastic Trees" yet, but it has managed to successfully compose a soundtrack to everything loud, discordant, and violent, complete with ambient segues. Even when the transitions meander a bit, which they sometimes do (just like Radiohead), it's worth the wait for the payoff. The brashest bits on this record are the stuff of escapist fantasies, practically demanding volume-knob twisting and steering-wheel drumming, and that's completely ignoring the vocals.

Even the modern-rock hit, "The Widow," the album's shortest song, contains lines about "fasting black lungs made of clove splintered shardes [sic]/they're the kind that will talk through a wheezing of coughs," which can't mean anything much other than this song is awesome! Zavala shrieks like Heart's Ann Wilson, while Rodriguez-Lopez shreds like Nancy Wilson at her "Barracuda" best; not that Heart has more than two other good songs or is otherwise similar or relevant to anything The Mars Volta is doing or that the "25 wives in the lake tonight ... 25 snakes pour out your eyes" as sung about in "Cassandra Gemini" wouldn't eat a barracuda, but I digress.

The suites, titles, and cryptic cover artwork draw obvious comparisons to other conceptual bands, most of whom The Mars Volta lays to waste within the album's first five minutes. The problem with most concept albums is the corny narrative that takes attention away from the sometimes-awesome music - at least in the case of Rush, whose idea of "progressive" was a temple-dwelling sect of priests living in a time just seven years from today - and, as far as I care to tell, The Mars Volta resists this temptation by issuing no discernible messages to overpower their spooky imagery. Their words, the ones I catch over the caterwauling, anyway, seem to be bilingual free associations about, I don't know, dead people. In fact, I don't know what anything on the album means, a fact that probably negates their hard work, but I AM COMPLETELY OKAY WITH THIS.

Every time a feedback drone explodes into something shocking, I accept it. The Mars Volta doesn't waste words, and I shouldn't either. Suffice it to say, had this album come out when I was 13, I may not have needed Dark Side of the Moon. I actually would have cared to decipher every song. I would have read the band's lyrics as poetry. I probably would have entered at least one different entry in my aforementioned favorite-artists list. Then, as now, I would let my mind get blown.

That beat, my friend, is correct.