Author Topic: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest  (Read 7992 times)

eltee

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Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #15 on: January 24, 2005, 01:18:00 pm »
I guess he's okay. Skinnier taller version of Ryan Adams me thinks. I prefer that cute youngin' from the show w/ Sandra Bernhardt and who was it, Bob Mould?

ggw

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Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #16 on: January 24, 2005, 01:26:00 pm »
Quote
Originally posted by Rhett Miller:
  His hairstyle is so 1994. Like most guys, he's held onto the same haircut since he was 13. If he was pushing 40, he'd have a mullet.
 
Should you really be critiquing another man's haircut?
 
 What exactly do you call this?  The "comb-forward"?  It looks like you colored it as well. Is that Cinnaberry or Spiced Auburn?
 
  <img src="http://robbiefulks.com/images/profiles/large/00358_0.559979621394636.jpg" alt=" - " />

Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #17 on: January 24, 2005, 01:43:00 pm »
Shut up, Napoleon Dynamite.
 
 No, I have never colored my hair, though Bright Eyes appears to color his.
 
 And I will take my haircut over his silly haircut, anyday.
 
   
Quote
Originally posted by ggwâ?¢:
   
Quote
Originally posted by Rhett Miller:
 [qb] His hairstyle is so 1994. Like most guys, he's held onto the same haircut since he was 13. If he was pushing 40, he'd have a mullet.
 [/b]
Should you really be critiquing another man's haircut?
 
 What exactly do you call this?  The "comb-forward"?  It looks like you colored it as well. Is that Cinnaberry or Spiced Auburn?

ggw

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Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #18 on: January 24, 2005, 02:03:00 pm »
By the way -- tell your mom that some tricep dips should help rid her of those unsightly "bingo arms"
 
  <img src="http://robbiefulks.com/images/profiles/large/00358_0.559979621394636.jpg" alt=" - " />

HoyaSaxa03

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Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #19 on: January 24, 2005, 07:49:00 pm »
i love allmusic.com and Stephen Thomas Erlewine, their head critic ... usually they grade their records on kind of an "expectation scale", instead of by personal preference ... ie, kenny chesney got 4/5 stars for his latest album, because its good for what it is ...
 
 here is Erlewine's 2/5 star review of the new bright eyes albums ...
 
 by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
 
 When writing about Conor Oberst, the singer/songwriter who records with an ever-changing group of musicians under the name Bright Eyes, it is customary to state his age within the first few sentences of the piece. It is also not uncommon to read comparisons between this Nebraskan singer/songwriter and Bob Dylan, the best-known singer/songwriter to hail from the Midwest. This serves a specific purpose -- to establish a context for Oberst's songwriting, to imply that he's some kind of "genius," not in the least for writing and recording albums at such a young age, particularly since he's been recording since the age of 13. And so many albums, too! Taking a page from the Robert Pollard handbook, he equates prolificness with profoundness, releasing multiple records each year, sometimes under different band names. All these pop critic cliches repeated ad infinitum in the new millennium's overheated media circuit settled into conventional wisdom not long after the release of his fourth proper album Lifted or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground in 2002. Positive reviews, all praising his ambition, endless lyrics and apparent sincerity, flowed in and a cult started to form around Oberst. By 2004, he was nearly inescapable, appearing everywhere from The OC -- where Lifted was part of the Seth Cohen Starter Pack -- to representing the younger generation on Moveon.Org's Vote for Change tour (which could be a reason why John Kerry couldn't motivate collegiate voters), culminating in Bright Eyes suddenly and surprisingly topping the Billboard singles charts with two singles.All this set the stage for the release of a pair of new Bright Eyes albums in the first weeks of 2005: the acoustic-based I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning and the electronic-inflected Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. The timing is no accident: big albums are rarely released in the musical graveyard of January, so Oberst had no competition for headlines this time around. He was in every magazine, from Rolling Stone to Newsweek, and the reviews were uniformly positive, trotting out all the familiar "gifted youth" and "next Dylan" boilerplate, but this time, there was a difference. Most reviews were written from the perspective that it was taken for granted that this kid sure was a genius, the next great rock & roll star. It was as if standing on-stage with Michael Stipe and Bruce Springsteen in the fall of 2004 was tantamount to Oberst inheriting their throne as rock statesmen, even if his music has little, if anything, to do with that of R.E.M. or the Boss, or for anything that could be construed as mass popular music, for that matter. Oberst comes from the post-ironic stream of indie rock, not quite emo but certainly not part of the arch, alternately ironic and bittersweet aesthetic that marked the style's heyday in the first two-thirds of the '90s. He's leapfrogged over Chris Carrabba in Dashboard Confessional to be the figurehead for how certain strands of modern rock is judged solely on whether it's a personal emotional expression or not, never taking into account such niceties as craft, in either music or lyrics, or in the sheer impact of the music. It's a million miles removed from the sprawling narratives of Springsteen, the jangled Southern mysticism of R.E.M. or, certainly, the poetry and roadhouse rock & roll of Bob Dylan, and nowhere is that clearer than on I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, Oberst's first high-profile, straight-ahead singer/songwriter record.Last time around, Oberst shoved all of his interests into one long, overstuffed pseudo-epic, but with I'm Wide Awake and Digital Ash, he isolates the country-rock confessionals on the former and saves the messy modernistic indie rock for the latter, as if to counter the criticisms that he can't focus. I'm Wide Awake is designed as a nakedly honest singer/songwriter album, somewhat inspired by the classics of the genre in the '70s -- he even recruits Emmylou Harris for some harmonies, hoping that some of the old Gram Parsons' magic will rub off -- but its directness reveals that the emperor has no clothes. Stripped of the careening, dramatic, meandering arrangements of Lifted, Oberst's music seems not simpler, but simplistic, the plodding music acting as a bed for monochromatic melodies that merely serve as a delivery mechanism for all those words he's poured out on the page. Far from being the second coming of Dylan, Oberst is as precious as Paul Simon, but without any sense of rhyme or meter or gift for imagery, puking out lines filled with cheap metaphors and clumsy words that don't scan. Supporters excuse this as soul-searching, but the heavy-handed pretension in the words and the affectedness in his delivery -- not to mention the quavering bleat that's halfway between Feargal Sharkey and the Dead Milkmen's Rodney Anonymous -- give the whole enterprise a sense of phoniness that's only enhanced by its unadorned production. When Oberst was swallowed in the deliberate grandeur of Lifted, his drama queen theatrics fit the music, but here, they expose him for the shallow poseur he is. As the record winds down, it's clear that Bright Eyes is little more than a pretty boy in a sweater who's idea of being clever is appropriating Beethoven's Ode to Joy for "Road to Joy" -- a move that makes you grateful that Billy Joel at least knew enough Beethoven to steal a lesser-known melody for "This Night" (and, being the stand-up guy that he is, Billy gave him a co-writing credit, something Conor doesn't do here).Digital Ash in a Digital Urn is designed to be the musical polar opposite to I'm Wide Awake, to be the ambitious, modernistic electronic record that stands in contrast to the sepia-toned, classicist acoustic LP, but it suffers from nearly all the same flaws as its companion. The production and arrangements may have changed, but the music still serves as little more than a vehicle for Oberst's tortured prose. Here, the lines are clipped instead of languid as they are on I'm Wide Awake, but instead of scaling back his words and sharpening his attack, he piles on even more words, littering the songs with awkward illusions and clunky couplets. While the music moves the words forward more here than on I'm Wide Awake, it's merely as punctuation for certain lyrical phrases, not for the song as a whole. Nevertheless, that variety in the music makes Digital Ash a more interesting listen than its companion, but only up to a certain point. Ultimately, it's hard not to feel that this album is little more than a blatant attempt to ape the Postal Service's Give Up, right down to Jimmy Tamborello's appearance halfway through the LP. Not that rip-offs are necessarily a bad thing -- it's at the heart of pop music -- but since Oberst lacks the most basic musical skill, which is to know how to make music sound good on a sheer sonic level, Digital Ash collapses in a mess of preening pretension. And don't chalk up its weakness to youth, either, or suggest that he'll get better with age. Paul McCartney was 22 at the height of Beatlemania. At the age of 23, Dylan made Bringing It All Back Home, Neil Young released Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and Jackson Browne cut his debut. Kurt Cobain was 24 when Nirvana recorded Nevermind, the same age Conor Oberst was when he released the pair of albums that prove without a shadow of a doubt that instead of reaching musical maturity, he's wallowing in a perpetual adolescence.
(o|o)

snailhook

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Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #20 on: January 24, 2005, 09:11:00 pm »
hahaha, hoya...i was just gonna post the AMG review. i don't usually agree with erlewine, but i think he is dead-on here. absolutely brutal. i fucking hate bright eyes. however, i'll be working the show and am stoked to see cocorosie, who will blow that chump off the stage.

bellenseb

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Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #21 on: January 24, 2005, 09:55:00 pm »
This review is classic in that its venom is directed as much toward the media hype as the artist. Look, did Bright Eyes ever ASK to be labeled the new Dylan or any other innacurate, lazy shorthand? He's still on a tiny label, for God's sake. (If this makes him too precious, I suppose if he signed to Sony that would be terrible, too.)
 
 His music is often way over the top and at times sloppy, which understandably offends lots of sensibilities. He makes lots of people happy, many of whom love the critic-proof acts Erlewine cites. (Imagine the record collections of Bright Eyes fans vs. say, Dashboard Confessional fans. Think there's no difference?)
 
 And frankly, it's pretty hard to deny he has a songwriting gift, even if you hate his "image" and lyrics and general persona (which the media has been inflating to the point of caricature, and has to be annoying even the most diehard fans). He may be a guilty pleasure, but that doesn't make him deserving of this ridiculous venom.
 
 "Oberst lacks the most basic musical skill, which is to know how to make music sound good on a sheer sonic level..."
 
 This is his opinion, but it's humorless, myopic hyperbole that makes him look like a sloppy, petty blogger, not a respected reviewer. (How *pathetic* that he cops Beethoven! Billy Joel did it better by picking a more obscure Beethoven song! Loser!)
 
 Anyway, it's cool to hate Bright Eyes, but don't blame him for a thousand lazy write-ups.

K8teebug

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Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #22 on: January 25, 2005, 09:07:00 am »
Regardless, his "misery look" is still cute.  I have to say though, that I don't care for most of his music.  And, he's definitely no Bob Dylan.

Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #23 on: January 25, 2005, 10:03:00 am »
I agree 100% with the review. However, any review over 250 words makes the reviewer end up looking like a blowhard.

thirsty moore

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Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #24 on: January 25, 2005, 10:31:00 am »
Forget the reviews, I wanna know why the photos were taken down.  Everytime I look at them I discover something new.  Yesterday it was that Steve Earle was holding a cigarette.

Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #25 on: January 25, 2005, 10:35:00 am »
And you can be damn sure I told Steve that the cigarette was going to kill him if he kept it up.
 
 
Quote
Originally posted by econo:
  Forget the reviews, I wanna know why the photos were taken down.  Everytime I look at them I discover something new.  Yesterday it was that Steve Earle was holding a cigarette.

warman31337

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Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #26 on: January 25, 2005, 06:47:00 pm »
i love conor
 
 i'd totally turn gay for him

Taster

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Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #27 on: January 26, 2005, 02:00:00 pm »
They DID play Bob Seger on The OC.  Julie Cooper loves Night Moves.

BookerT

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Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #28 on: January 26, 2005, 02:21:00 pm »
Quote
I agree 100% with the review.
just wondering, have you heard the record?

Re: 29 thoughts about the apparent sexiness of conor oberest
« Reply #29 on: January 26, 2005, 03:14:00 pm »
I have heard several tracks off of the I'm Awake album on the radio. If they're indicative of the rest of the album, it's pretty cringeworthy. Will make me sorry I ever said anything bad about Arcade Fire.
 
 
Quote
Originally posted by BookerT:
   
Quote
I agree 100% with the review.
just wondering, have you heard the record? [/b]