Every time I hear Bright Eyes, I can't help thinking of fellow Omaha singer-songwriter Simon Joyner, who is, in a lot of ways, Conor Oberst's direct antecedent-- reared in the same scene, given to nakedly confessional, lyrics-first songwriting, folk-influenced, with a voice you'll either love or love to hate. Joyner has released eight albums since his 1993 debut, with each record surrounded by a veritable constellation of singles and compilation tracks, the kind of thing that creates nightmares for fans who don't live in places where all those scatterlings are procurable.
With Beautiful Losers, that nightmare is over, as it draws together more than an hour's worth of non-album tracks and sweepings from the cutting room-- 21 songs in all. The compilation doesn't bother with chronology, instead sequencing for flow, drawing all of its songs from the 1994-1999 span when Joyner was at his most prolific. As such, it predates what to my ears is his masterpiece, 2001's Hotel Lives, though it offers plenty of hints of that record's bleak, ramshackle sound. The album also exhibits a decent amount of variety-- it features heart-pounding, hyperactive folk fingerpicking, melodic dirges, hard-strummed laments, and even a few passing stabs at rock.
As one might expect, the last of those rank among the disc's worst moments, and the absolutely nadir is undoubtedly "Judas Blues", a lo-fi garage number too covered in crust to be punchy, too poorly sung to be catchy and too ineptly played to actually rock. There are a few other songs on which Joyner's singing is just a bit too ragged to effectively convey the tune, resulting in melodies that are more implied than real. "Swing" is a pretty prime example of this, where Joyner's croak doesn't even rise close to a croon, and it's hard to tell even where he thought the melody was going.
So they're not all diamonds, but they're not all lumps of coal either. There are even a few genuine surprises, like "R Is for Riot", a speedy, drum-led tune on which Joyner effectively and quickly strings his words together with a tumbling melody, as the Velvet Underground also sometimes did. Townes Van Zandt and Will Oldham, however, are closer reference points on most of the rest of the disc, such as "Love Is Worth Suffering For" and "I Would Not Try to Break Ties With Me"-- the latter manages to juxtapose the sound of romantic dejection with suburban imagery like "the girls at the Clip 'n' Curl are talking about a man/ With a rose in his coat/ And your name on the stem."
The real jewel of the compilation, though, is "Milk", with forcefully strummed acoustic guitar creating a frenzied atmosphere that sends lyrics like "This is not a song/ This is just one of those vivid dreams...sometimes I wake up in the darkness when I should have stayed asleep" straight home and plays to his vocal strengths. It's a great song that any Joyner fan should hear. Joyner fans are about the only ones who should hear much of the rest of this disc, though, which is basically par for a rarities collection. Everyone else can check out Hotel Lives or the Lousy Dance and leave it at that.
