Tuesday
January 25, 2005
arts.rmichigandaily. com
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ARTS

*

10



MARSHALL W.
LEE

The long road home

BRIGHT
FUTURE

INDIE-ROCK PRODIGY CONOR
OBERST BREAKS EVEN WITH
NEW RELEASES

By Andrew M. Gaerig
Daily Music Editor

Conor Oberst dreams big. The Bright Eyes
mastermind tortures copy editors with humil-
ity-raping album titles like Lifted, or the Story

is in the Soil, Keep your
He has foolishly believed,

Ear to the Ground.

.

for the last decade, that his
fans would forgive his on- Bright Eyes
record temper-tantrums I'm Wide Awake
and his humiliating lyrical It's Morning
turns so long as he sounds &
huge and important. For Digital Ash in
an underground artist, he a Digital Urn
has been accused of many Saddle Creek Records
heinous things: He's arro-
gant (true); he's a wunderkind fuck up (prob-
ably); he's a scene-making prima donna (better
than even odds); and he's a young hack song-
writer with a goofy warble and childish lyrics
(debatable).
On the other hand, he has admirably stuck by
his hometown label Saddle Creek, spurning big
offers from the majors. When the singles from
his new albums hit numbers one and two on
the Billboard Singles chart last month, he was
instantly anointed indie-rock's brightest hope,
an artist capable of maintaining underground
credibility while racking up record sales.
Oberst, for his part, has accepted the role of
the romantic songwriting genius of his genera-
tion with suspiciously little hesitation. Conor
Oberst is thoroughly convinced that Conor
Oberst is the great underground hope.
Oberst also thinks he can get away with going
all Guns 'n' Roses on us, releasing two albums
on one day: one of them a mostly acoustic,
singer/songwriter exercise, I'm Wide Awake,
It's Morning, the other a decidedly more elec-
tric/eclectic full-band set, Digital Ash in a
Digital Urn. Oberst dreams big, sure, and up
until now, he has failed at least half the time.
In truth, this double-album jaunt is a lose/lose
proposition, philosophically. The Americana
credibility he openly desires on Wide Awake
is undermined by his urge to go electronic on
Digital. His experimental digs on Digital are
damned as posturing by his Awake's tradi-

tional ethos. Add to this the growing weight
of every rock critic's "next big thing" and the
"sellout" whispers that are starting to pass
among longtime fans, and Oberst is off to a
rocky start, at best.
This is why the rant that opens I'm Wide
Awake, It's Morning is puzzling. Surely, noth-
ing this ham-handedly ridiculous, nothing this
stutteringly amateur would be allowed to kick
off Oberst's big breakthrough. He tells a story
of a woman on a crashing plane, comforted
by a stranger who tells her that they're headed
toward her birthday party, that "we all love
you very, very, very, very, very much!" Oberst
sounds unrehearsed; his voice cracks. You can
bet that this sort of half-baked romanticism will
not show up whenever Death Cab for Cutie gets
around to releasing that major label debut.
Despite the intro, Wide Awake fares remark-
ably well. "At the Bottom of Everything"
jumps out from story time as Oberst's most
clever Dylan rip yet, which isn't a problem in
the least: If anything has been learned over
the course of Oberst's last few albums, it's that
he's best when he goes all Blonde on Blonde
on everyone.
Sure, there are missteps - the lyrical mis-
cues of "Old Soul Song" come immediate-
ly to mind - but this is a concertedly more
even effort than anyone is used to hearing
from Oberst. "We Are Nowhere and It's Now"
makes good on its melancholic promise, while
"Another Travelin' Song" transcends its abhor-
rent title. The slo-mo cinema of "Land Locked
Blues" is one of Oberst's best ballads.
Oberst officially hits his stride with "Poison
Oak." He runs through a few rhyming bars with
nothing but an acoustic guitar, but by the time
the band kicks in, his swinging melody looks
up proudly and the lyrics seem, for the first
time, like Oberst's pushing square pegs into
square holes. When he announces, among glo-
rious pedal steel and whapping cymbals, that
he's, "drunk as hell / on a piano bench," the
drama is palpable and believable. It's a rous-
ing, sad time, even if he fumbles around like a
nervous virgin on the very next track, doing the
critics' dirty work for them: "I could have been
a fampous singer / If I had someone else's voice /
But failure's always sounded better / Let's fuck
it up boys, make some noise."

Courtesy of
Saddle Creek
You make
Morrisey
look like
John
McClane.
Digital Ash should be the bombastic soul-
mate to Wide Awake, where Oberst drums up
some electric guitars and "rocks out." Instead,
he bathes his pop-rock tunes in enough key-
boards and drum machines to nab some Cure
comparisons. The album starts strongly, with
"Time Code" emerging from the, ahem, digital
ash as a slight, minimal pop song. "Gold Mine
Gutted" overcomes an awkward chorus with a
chiming melody.
The rest of the disc is far less assured,
switching between the downhill sugar rush of
"Arc of Time" and the unbearably middle-of-
the-road art-rock of "Hit the Switch." "Light
Pollution" survives on a strong narrative, but
"Theme from Pinata" rehashes older work, suc-
cumbing to trite lyrics and a boring melody. On
the whole, Digital Ash sounds like a string of
mostly failed experiments. Nabbing Postal Ser-
vice beatmaker Jimmy Tamborello seems more
like a publicity plea than spirited collaboration.
Digital Ash is different, to be sure, but it's also
uneven, forced and predictable.
Oberst should be congratulated for releasing
two albums for which critics can't pull out the
old, "There's only one album of good material
here" blather. It's true, of course, it's just that
the one album of good material would be a dis-
jointed, rotten affair. Oberst makes great strides
here, even when he stumbles. He's toned down
the tantrums, learned a little restraint and his
good lyric/bad lyric ratio sees the sunny side
of 1.0 for the first time ever. He even seems to
realize how subpar Digital Ash is, as he saves
all his jaw-droppers for the considerably fresh-
er Wide Awake.
In the end, Oberst's heart still outpaces his
brain. Both discs suffer from weak tracks,
childish rhymes and unbecoming amounts of
confidence. Both discs end with fits of ruptured
noise, as if Oberst is standing on a bully pulpit
screaming, "Hey! Kids! Entropy!" He still has
a long way to go as an artist, but Wide Awake
and Digital Ash have enough lucid moments
and exciting climaxes to suggest, for the first
time, that Oberst is destined for more than cult
status. The countdown to his first great album
starts here.
I'm Wide Awake It's Morning: ***I
Digital Ash in a Digital Urn: **

As another shitty, cold win-
ter settles over Ann Arbor,
blanketing the sidewalks in
treacherous snow and transforming
State Street into an icy death-luge,
I can't help but wonder just what it
is that makes this frigid season so
fucking wonderful? But then, like a
beam of yellow sun burning through
the clouds, I recall the bright spots
shining low over Hollywood. I imag-
ine the measured grace and exagger-
ated curves of movie stars dressed up
like movie starlets, sauntering across
a crimson carpet and reveling in the
glory of their bizarre lives. In short,
I find my reason for the season: The
Academy Awards.
If you're like me, you anticipate
the Oscars with bated breath and
furious action - settling debts from
last year's pool, downloading Isra-
el's Foreign Language bid, hoping
against hope that maybe the Acade-
my will get things right this year and
find a statue for Kaufman or Murray
or Payne. But if, like me, you call
Ann Arbor home, these glacial weeks
between the Golden Globes - don't
get me started - and the Oscars are
also a time of immense frustration,
as production houses and distributors
tease and taunt smaller markets with
their maddening and incomprehen-
sible release schedules.
Despite boasting six rather impres-
sive theaters within a 10-mile radius
of Central Campus, Ann Arbor is
considered by major distributors such
as New Line and Warner Bros. to be
a minor market town. Big budget, big
name titles such as Clint Eastwood's
"Million Dollar Baby" and "Hotel
Rwanda" with Don Cheadle (both
critical darlings and major contend-
ers come Oscar time) are suspicious-
ly absent from the marquees of our
city's two famed art houses. "Bad
Education" and "The Sea Inside,"
acclaimed foreign flicks that opened
wide in October, have just begun to
eke their way across the Midwest,
gracing a few theaters in Pittsburgh
and Chicago while discreetly avoid-
ing our mitten state.
While "Vera Drake" wows crowds
in New York, the entertainment-
starved masses of middle America
shell out their hard-earned money to
see such cinematic abortions as "Are
We There Yet?," in which Ice Cube
plays - and I'm just guessing here

- a young bachelor out trolling for
ass, who gets roped into a hilarious
and heart-warming misadventure.
Was I right?
But for those few determined and
restless film buffs with time to spare
and a little extra cash on hand, there
is a ray of hope: an excruciatingly
bourgeois, intolerant and conserva-
tive ray of hope known as Birming-
ham. If you haven't guessed it, I am
one of the privileged few fortunate
enough to call this sprawling suburb
home.
Situated 30 miles northeast of Ann
Arbor, this mecca of middle-class
decadence is Oakland County's new
cultural seatsand Michigan's primary
market for independent and foreign
releases - "Million Dollar Baby,"
which will open in Ann Arbor this
weekend, has been playing theretfor
nearly a month. Birmingham's major
theater, the Uptown Palladium 12, is
a poorly planned, poorly run pow-
erhouse that charges $6 for popcorn
and funnels unassuming filmgoers
through an insufferable three-story
gauntlet of preteen gangstas and
middle-aged trophy wives. The city's
"art" house - whose gilded marquee
grandly announced the opening of
"The Spongebob Squarepants Movie"
in November - is an outdated and
decrepit theater with fuzzy, muffled
sound and a lot of bad seats. And yet,
just like its extravagant baby brother
up the road, the Birmingham 8 The-
ater continues to rake in cash from
folks like me, movie lovers who find
the maddening mechanics and poli-
tics of regional distribution utterly
unendurable and who would rather
drive 40 minutes on a Monday night
than wait another month to see "A
Very Long Engagement."
So this is my formal plea to the
powers that be: Please find a way to
make the marketing people under-
stand that withholding a film to build
buzz is extraneous and unfair during
awards season. Please show the suits
that Ann Arbor is Michigan's most
vibrant and culturally relevant city;
And please, please don't make me go
home again.
- Marshall hates Birmingham,
film distribution policies and "Are
We There Yet?" Is there anything
else he needs to add to his list? Offer
suggestions to leemw@umich.edu.

0

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' F}A 4 '
WINTERFEST
2005!
A STUDENT ORGANIZATION
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