Bright Eyes :: I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning

As 2005 was just waking up, the Omaha based Bright Eyes simultaneously released two albums: I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. This isn’t a double album with a collection of twenty or so songs, but two unique pieces that are inextricable from one another. Awake is a tight, well focused analog folk record and Ash is a more experimental digital and electric album. The connections between the albums go much deeper than the realization that the same beach blanket lyric is in ‘First Day of My Life’ and ‘Take it Easy (Love Nothing).’ The records are compliments and foils, one not complete without its opposite.

The most intriguing thing about Bright Eyes has always been the lyrical mastery of self-reference, supernatural self-awareness, self-deprecation and even self-obsession. Through the prism that is Conor Oberst, a listener who pays close attention to the words will better understand the full spectrum of his human experience. This ranges from small feelings of emotional disparity in relationships to the overwhelming distress about the purpose of existence.

One of the most fascinating things about Bright Eyes is the progression throughout the albums of the “narrator’s” character and his interactions with fictitious loves, including the all too real Laura. It seems as if, since Conor began writing, he began telling a story and each album is another chapter. There is one theme that is a constant undercurrent behind Conor’s pen. In the song ‘Milk Thistle’ from his first solo record, Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, Mr. Oberst wrote the line, “I keep death on my mind like a heavy crown.”

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Preview :: Favorite New Music of 2009

If you're looking for new music, here's some albums that have been floating around the Mango Nebula that deserve a listen and will probably be reviewed soon.
A track from each artist has been compiled into a playlist above.


Cymbals Eat Guitars


Crazy experimental guitar jazz reminiscent of At the Drive-In, mixed with punk rock and sleazy piano interludes. You can't predict what's going to happen next and there's something hidden everywhere in these songs that take you on a journey.






Woods

Since Animal Collective's Sung Tongs I really wouldn't apply the term "freak folk" to any artist, let alone even to Animal Collective anymore. However, Wood's Songs of Shame can get pretty freaky with your ears. It has a mostly folk feel, but there is a lot of wild electric guitar solos and distortion that somehow fits right in. They have some outstandingly catchy songs that will make you croon and howl along.






tUnE-yArDs


Chaotic mellow pop that can get merrily noisy, with a female vocalist that can occasionally go flat, but never loses her charm, and with audio clips mixed of children talking and other random goodies mixed in.






The Mountain Goats - The Life of the World to Come


An album based entirely around bible verses sounds like a horrible idea at first. We all remember when Dylan went through his Christianity phase... However this album is some of the Goats' catchiest and best written material. They even get a little angry and evil on Psalms.


...for that matter:

Moon Colony Bloodbath


John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats and John Vanderslice came together to write this happy EP about cannibalistic organ harvesting colonies on the moon. Yes, it is as amazing as it sounds.







Japandroids


No Age is a Mango Nebula favorite and Japandroids have picked up the formula well. Drummer and Guitarist playing warped and sludging guitar riffs with indiscernably distorted vocals. Sometimes its just the release you need. And they're called Japandroids!!! I like to think of the album title as a snub at the pretentious types that prematurely ejaculate over post-modernism.




Cass McCombs


Folk that's a little southern, gets some commentary in there and a voice that just draws you in. It gets playful with silly vocals and sounds too. So well produced that you can almost see the cave he's singing in.






The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

It is quite painful, isn't it? These guys remind me of Belle & Sebastian if they never put down the electric guitar or turned down the distortion knob. Accents and everything!








Neon Indian


Someone besides Passion Pit proved that they can make digital music without repeating one line and one musical progression over and over and over and over and over again. Synth pop at it's best. (Expect to see a lot more bands like this soon, they just won't do it as well)





The Antlers - Hospice


The piano and soft, slippery vocals whisper right into your brain. Oh, and they know how to make noise too. And you've got to give respect to a band that writes a song about Sylvia Plath. Don't cry, it'll be alright, you little head appendages of various deer species.






Animal Collective - Fall Be Kind


This is an EP you can get lost in. A lot of musical interludes and chaos to sink your teeth into while you're waiting for the next album.







and if you haven't already checked out:

Grizzly Bear,
Dirty Projectors,
Christians and Lions,
St. Vincent,
Volcano Choir,
The XX,
Real Estate,
Nirvana - Live in Reading
No Age - Loosing Feeling
Super Furry Animals - Dark Days/Light Years
John Vanderslice - Romanian Names,
M. Ward - Hold Time
David Bazaan - Curse Your Branches,
Owen - New Leaves,
Atlas Sound - Logos,
Brand New - Daisy,
Regina Spektor - Far,
Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion,
Islands - Vapours,
Flight of the Conchords - I Told You I Was Freaky,
Built to Spill - There Is No Enemy,
Benjamin Gibbard and Jay Farrar - One Fast Move or I'm Gone,
The Flaming Lips - Embryonic,
Dinosaur Jr. - Farm,
or the Where The Wild Things Are Soundtrack,

you should. You really should. It's been a great year for music.

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Brand New :: Daisy

Daisy breathes, through the chaos of its construction, a juxtaposing elemental vitality; the coherent whole is built out of contradictory parts. There are some of the catchiest pop tunes the band has ever written, residing in grooves right next to abrasive and psychedelic tracks that will have you likewise yelling along. Sometimes it even happens in the same song. It’s an album of experimentation, something unexpected around the corner of each song’s end. It seems to be working for the band as it’s their highest ranking album, the soft->loud dynamic getting them Radiohead comparisons left and right.

The album cover is by Peter Sutherland and it follows the trend from their last album, The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me, of deliberately odd and obscure photos. The pictures included in the jacket are a mesh of colors, simple patterns and dark band photos. The vinyl version of the album that saw limited release only on the internet, comes with one additional photo as an insert: a big aqua manatee. The photos serve the same purpose as post-modern paintings, being intentionally misdirecting and ambiguous in order to convey only an emotion with no associations. The small yellow fox on the front somehow is the perfect image to hold hands with the sound of Daisy.

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Atlas Sound :: Logos

Atlas Sound is the name Bradford Cox has used since he started playing music, the band from which his most lauded project was spawned. Logos haunts itself so well that it will make you forget that deer hunting exists. Cox gets some help from Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear of Animal Collective, and Lætitia Sadier of Stereolab. The pieces blend together and burn like a pit of fire in Cox’s sunken chest.

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Album Review :: Real Estate

Real Estate is a band that could bear the brand of “surf,” even though they’re from the Garden State. An aquatic vibe pervades the music. Their lyrics and song titles make a lot of references to beaches, lakes, pools and rivers. They sound is a necromancer conjuring the slide and pop of The Beach Boys from out of the cosmos. Their vocals swim (and sometimes drown) is an ocean of reverb.

Their self-titled debut has a comforting, familiar feel. It’s like finding a shoebox full of mementos and photographs in your attic from some forgotten time. Immediately, the warmth of recollecting embraces you and it seems that there is a vastness, which is nostalgia, distilled in a single object. You are almost transported to some foggy memory that you never had, pulling your surfboard off the top of your Vista Cruiser and dragging it through the sand and surf until nightfall, when you make a fire on the beach.

Whereas the album emulates warmth and calm, after a while it gets a bit too familiar and needs some diversity. You’ll probably only look at the objects in the shoebox for as long as you’re in the attic. Once the lid is closed, you won’t open it again until you stumble across it randomly sometime in the future.

http://www.myspace.com/letsrockthebeach

Posted to Artistadvocacy.com on December 15th, 2009

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