Conor Oberst "Conor Oberst" (Merge)
****
Conor Oberst hasn't through an album under his own discover since the dawn of his vocation in the early '90s, establishing his reputation as the defining songwriter of his generation since then mainly under the Bright Eyes banner.
This return to his original billing doesn't signal a radical reinvention. The mention tag and most of the supporting team (bassist Macey Taylor, guitarist Nik Freitas and Rilo Kiley drummer Jason Boesel ar the core band) ar different on "Conor Oberst," but the record, which comes proscribed today, mingles folk rock, country, pop and rootsy rock to land not too far from Bright Eyes' broad turf.
It's a little looser, which means pretty loose indeed, and sometimes a lot looser. A minute into the anthem-like rock song "Souled Out!!!," there's a sudden interruption followed by laughter, and then a quick question to the musicians: "Chorus once more or another one?"
This is flying by the seat of the pants in the look of the Replacements, and by using this take away rather than a proper performance, Oberst helps set the record's freewheeling tone.
In its spontaneousness and simplicity, the album comes off as Bright Eyes after hours, simply while the musical ambitions are scaly back, it's not slight or a throwaway in any sense. There's overly much decease on its mind for that, and Oberst, 28, remains engaged in his quest to make sentience of a world that he describes in one song as "a savage and complicate hoax."
As he did on the last Bright Eyes album, "Cassadaga," Oberst generates a sense of invariant physical and psychic motion, plotting his journey with geographical detail. "There's nil that the road cannot heal," he sings, proposing propulsion as a precondition of enlightenment.
He cruises through pockets of melancholy and mayhem, tenderness and tragedy. His melodies curl to drive the stories, while his lyrics illuminate the road with a sometimes dazzling faint. Oberst's debt to Texas troubadours such as Townes Van Zandt has never been more evident.
As he examines big themes -- loss of innocence, hungriness for security department, a starve to understand his fate -- Oberst considers scientific tables and the astral plane merely ultimately realizes that "there's no organisation, there's no guarantee."
A kid who's anxious of crab -- "unsound blood bone marrow, bald little boy" -- inspires that conclusion, just Oberst likewise sees redemption in the child's will to cause a connecter, and he follows that song, "Danny Callahan," with "I Don't Want to Die (In the Hospital)," a slapstick escape story set to piano-pounding, boogie-rock.
"Alone" might be the ultimate and inevitable condition, just until and then, this defiant affirmation insists, get your boots on and party.
--Richard Cromelin
A rooftop party
Brazilian Girls "New York City" (Verve Forecast)
***
The Brazilian Girls, quaternity non-Brazilians from New York City, take always made fizzy, smart music for a certain kind of Manhattan party girl. With their third album, "New York City," an obvious title for a band that synthesizes the metropolis' glamorous clamor, they've caught that art school tart in a few more moods than usual.
Not that the album skimps on the tracks intentional for Prosecco-soaked rooftop soirees. "Losing Myself" staggers about a aphrodisiacal organ stomp, and "Good Time" is a fashionable bon vivant that pushes singer Sabina Sciubba's multilingualism into playful nonsense. "Some people go booo they go qua qua they go peeep," she casually intones. The Brazilian Girls know that party intellectuals shouldn't take on themselves as well seriously.
The foundation garment of the band's boutique pop isn't its ethnical fluency only its hardiness to be substantially gonzo, which is often realized on "New York City." On "Internacional," already elevated by singer's Baaba Maal's soaring vocals, drummer Aaron Johnston revitalizes the city shout-out with roving, Pan-African percussion.
Although the Brazilian Girls know that style is timeless, they're not afraid to update. "Ricardo" could be the climactic song from a long-lost French New Wave film or featured on the soundtrack to �Quantum of Solace,� the next James Bond movie. Are you hearing, Hollywood?
--Margaret Wappler
Not working stiffs
The Enemy UK "We'll Live and Die in These Towns" (Warner Bros.)
***1/2
This willful young triad is a genuine sense in its native UK, where "We'll Live and Die in These Towns" debuted atop the album-sales chart upon its release there more than a year ago. "This volition be the genesis of 1,000 bands in Britain," raved NME with characteristic restraint.
Like the Arctic Monkeys, the Enemy UK -- which plays its first area show at the Troubadour Wednesday night -- builds bitter pop-punk bombs about the travails of the average earnings slave: In "Away From Here" singer-guitarist Tom Clarke admits, "I'm so sickish sick disgusted and tired of working just to be retired," while "It's Not OK" cautions against "living your life by the warning signal that wakes you up every day at eight."
Yet thanks to Clarke's well-developed tune sense and his bandmates' primal need for speed, "We'll Live and Die in These Towns" doesn't sound the way life in a cubicle feels; if anything, it replicates the adrenaline haste of one of those YouTube videos in which a stir-crazy office proletarian decimates a copy machine.
Even hope rears its head in "You're Not Alone," where Clarke insists, "There's just overly many dreams in this wasteland for you to leave us all behind."
--Mikael Wood
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