Inspiration: Gigs
Created: Wed 6 Apr 2005 14:02
As promised on Monday, I'm now back with some words and photos about Bright Eyes. A good support act is supposed to whet the appetite for what's to come, and at Sunday night's R.E.M. show, Bright Eyes did just that. Only they weren't really warming up the crowd for R.E.M. as much as they were warming up select parts of the crowd for their own gig, which was last night at the POW. The extremely brief five song set on Sunday night showed that they were going to be great in their own space, and I think a couple of people who hadn't before heard the angst-filled toons of one Conor Oberst may have sat up and taken notice (though I'm sure just as many were just biding their time until R.E.M. hit the stage).
Some call him the new Bob Dylan (even my dad said it, so it must be true). Some have compared him to Robert Smith (well, they might have - I think it's apt, anyway). It makes sense to talk about Conor Oberst in these terms, but he's definitely got a little bit of something that those others don't. Oberst is not afraid of himself, and he puts it all out there (consider the lyrics "I could have been a famous singer, if I had someone else's voice" from Road To Joy), leading to some what I would call dubious moments on some of his recordings. There are long spoken word sections, songs that start and then suddenly stop, as though he couldn't think of an ending so he just went all Monty Python's Flying Circus and moved onto the next thing, and some vocal bits which could barely be termed singing. Though there is a lot of hit to Bright Eyes' recorded stuff, there's also a fair proportion of miss.
But when Conor Oberst and his cohorts take to the stage, it's all hit. Sure, there were some things which could have been improved, for example, the recorded versions of the songs from I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning which feature Emmylou Harris are absolutely amazing, and without her, the songs are lacking something. To compensate, the songs from this album were played with less of a folk edge, and I'm pleased to say that they were all nicely pulled off. The "cos we're comin' for ya" line in Landlocked Blues garnered an amazing number of "wooooooo"s from the crowd, and Poison Oak was one of my personal favourites from the whole night.
Another moment of much woooing was the song When The President Talks To God, a political protest song which isn't on any of the albums, but is available as a B-side on certain editions of the First Day of My Life single. It's one of the more straight-forward protest songs that I've heard lyrics-wise: it's hard to miss the point of lines like "When the President talks to God, does he ever think that maybe he's not? That that voice is just inside his head, when he kneels next to the Presidential bed. Does he ever smell his own bullshit, when the President talks to God? I DOUBT IT." Making a nice addition to this song was the inclusion of the delightful ditty Nuclear War by Sun Ra (and, more recently, Yo La Tengo), within the fifteen minute or so long final song, Road To Joy. With its incisive lyrics of "Talking about nuclear war. It's a motherfucker, don't you know?", that song has always made me laugh. One other thing: there was a cover song in Mushaboom by Leslie Feist. Conor introduced it saying that they'd fallen in love with the album whilst touring, and had decided to play this song, but not to go hunting for her album, because that would expose the fact that the original version is much better (you can buy it here).
Overall, a kick-ass evening, and definitely worth the price of admission. With support from New Buffalo (possibly a little less fragile than the last time I saw her), the show was quite a contrast to the short set on Sunday night, and cemented Bright Eyes' place in my ever-growing list of favourite bands. See you again next time, Conor.
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Ryan (that one chick)
Posted by Ryan (site) on Sun 10 Apr 2005 06:33 #