You would have lived the rest of your years completely and perhaps blissfully unaware of Tarkio if it weren't for the fact that the band's singer and primary songwriter was Colin Meloy, now president-for-life of the Decemberists. And honestly you wouldn't have been missing very much. Omnibus, Tarkio's two-disk catch-all wrap-up from Kill Rock Stars (now the Decemberists' former home), is full of the kind of well-meaning, basically bland acoustic rock that all college towns seem to produce in bulk. In fact, the music is so rooted in a very particular strain of college rock that it could conceivably have been recorded ten years earlier with ambitions to sit on student playlists alongside Guadalcanal Diary, the Ocean Blue, and Bread and Circus-era Toad the Wet Sprocket.
Tarkio formed in Missoula, Montana, in 1996, after Meloy returned from a few semesters at the University of Oregon with a mind to change his major to English. Once settled, he recruited banjo player Gibson Hartwell, bassist Louis Stein, and drummer Brian Collins, and the band took its name from a nearby ghost town. Over just a few years, Tarkio recorded a few EPs-- most self-released, but one via Barcelona Records-- all of which are collected on Omnibus, along with a few previously unreleased tracks. Predictably, there's a lot of institutional guitar jangle in every song, along with some polite strumming, decent drumming, and Meloy's studious wordplay and lit-class allusions to Camus and The Sheltering Sky.
Then as now, Meloy stands out. His now-familiar vocals and brainy lyrics elevate the group above the mass of uncelebrated college bands past and present, even if he sounds like an impressionable student just out of a stimulating lit class. There are intimations of the scamp he would become with the Decemberists; Omnibus even contains an early, less animated version of "My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist" from the latter band's 5 Songs EP. But this is definitely Meloy in his formative years, before all the sea shanties and chimbley sweeps and military homoeroticism, when he was just getting control of his humor and intelligence. In the liner notes, he dismisses these songs with a half-interested "feh," preferring to think of them as a soundtrack to memories of camaraderie and teeth cutting.
Meloy's greatest flaw was his apparent inability to self-edit. The 27 songs on Omnibus are uniformly overlong, most approaching or surpassing the five-minute mark when barely a handful have cause to exceed three minutes. You have to wash the dishes and put on your pajamas before these songs take the hint. This may seem like a minor gripe, but it seriously compromises the individual and cumulative effect of these songs. "Caroline Avenue", for instance, has a catchy chorus saddled to Hartwell's galloping as well as some of the band's cleverest lyrics (although I don't believe Meloy when he claims he's "chasing shots of whiskey with everclear"), but drawn out to nearly six minutes, these elements lose their power and ultimately test your patience. Hartwell even admits as much in the liner notes that "on some level maybe what works about these recordings is not what they are but, what they could have been." They could have been shorter.
Some songs, mostly from the 1998 release I Guess I Was Hoping for Something More, hint strongly at what the band could have become with a few more years to refine their chops. "Helena Won't Get Stoned" is a buoyant sing-along that must have been a blast at their live shows (especially in, ahem, Helena), but "Candle" was probably the closer, with its ambitious and dour guitar coda. "Your Own Kind" is a tongue-in-cheek, yet suspiciously persuasive, approximation of easy listening, and "Standing Still" cribs shamelessly but fairly successfully from R.E.M.
Omnibus isn't arranged chronologically, which is a big check in the minus column. Presenting these tracks out of order severely skews the true story of the band, which seems like it should be a priority for such an artifact. This decision also means the second disc is weighed down with molasses-slow demos and live tracks like "Tristan and Isolde", which bears comparison to Dire Straits' much more piquant "Romeo and Juliet". The disc continues its dirge-like pace with tracks like "Never Will Marry" and "Following Camden Down", which seem to be sequenced to stop any momentum dead.
On the other hand, these songs weren't recorded for this type of release, and bands like Tarkio aren't mean for widespread scrutiny. There's a reason every college town has their own acoustic rock group: They don't export well. Their appeal is entirely local-- not so much the music itself, which is easily reproducible, but the unique thrill of seeing people you know or could know up there on stage playing music. I'm not knocking it. For many budding musicians, writers, lovers, fans, and students, that connection can be just as inspiring as any motivational speaker or activist theatre troupe. As such, Tarkio fulfilled a specifically local function, and if you weren't enrolled at the University of Montana seven or eight years ago, listening to Omnibus may be disappointing, perhaps even a little intrusive. You may not get it, but it wasn't meant for you.
