Both as a prodigy addled with "new Dylan" acclaim and an emo icon with a bratty attitude and nose-grazing bangs, Conor Oberst has been a squirrelly performer, whipping between genres and moods. Still, whether it's Desaparecidos' frantic punk-rock or Bright Eyes' folksy mewling, Oberst infuses most everything he touches with an awkward, frantic desperation; as a vocalist he sounds perennially uncomfortable, muscles tight and prepped to sprint away from the microphone. On his self-titled Merge debut, Oberst is focused on making escapes-- moving on, moving over, breaking out, hitting the streets, leaving it all behind, don't look back. "There's nothing that the road cannot heal," Oberst vows in the Tom Petty-esque "Moab", and he's never sounded more convinced: Conor Oberst figures escapism as its own kind of religion, a workable belief system for kids that can't sit still.
The notion of the road-as-savior isn't new-- for one, see decades of country music, from "Lost Highway" on-- and Oberst again embraces high, lonesome twang as his medium of choice, packing this record with the loose country rock that's ruled much of Bright Eyes' recent catalogue. The pervasive gripe about alt-country is that it's too gracious, too polite and predictable, and Oberst occasionally succumbs to Hank Williams-raising cowboy tropes ["Help me get my boots on, help me get my boots back on!" he yelps in "I Don't Want to Die (In the Hospital)"], but mostly, the genre suits his craggy vocals-- and his seemingly infinite supply of wistfulness.
Like anyone on the hunt for meaning, Oberst is compelled by mystical or metaphysical enclaves (see Bright Eyes' 2007 LP Cassadaga, named after a spiritualist compound in Florida populated, mostly, by psychics), and he opted to record Conor Oberst in the Mexican city of Tepoztlán (the name of his new backing band, the Mystic Valley Band, was inspired by the city-- where, legend says, the Aztec feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl was born). It's not surprising that Oberst ditched the U.S. to make a record about flight, but even from Mexico, he manages to skewer American soullessness: Oberst has always had a knack for spitting out tiny, dismal nuggets-- "There are pink flamingoes living in the mall," he sighs in "Lenders in the Temple"-- that successfully (and succinctly) suggest a kind of cultural and moral apocalypse. Since his days as a spastic, barking teenager, Oberst has traded in a lot of his post-adolescent trembling for a calmer, less unbridled melancholy, but Conor Oberst is still packed with disheartening realities, and Oberst refuses to temper his pessimism, even when it starts to feel heavy and contrived, more like a narrative tic than anything else.
Opener "Cape Canaveral", with its acoustic strums and barely-there percussion, is a lovely, quasi-nostalgic meditation of the 1969 moon mission (the "red rocket blaze over Cape Canaveral"-- an epic escape if there ever was one). The song ultimately transforms into an ode to movement-as-salvation, setting the scene for the eleven tracks which follow. "Hey, hey, hey mother interstate,/ can you deliver me from evil,/ make me honest make me wedding cake?" he wonders. "Atone, I will atone."
"Sausalito" is a rollicking daydream about camping out on a houseboat in California; "NYC - Gone, Gone" is a stomping, distorted burst about leaving New York for Mexico. "Gone, gone from New York City,/ where you gonna go with a head that empty?" Oberst demands. "Milk Thistle", which closes the album, is a grim acoustic song about dying (Oberst never mentions alcohol explicitly, but milk thistle, a purported hangover cure, is often employed, holistically, to treat liver disease-- so it doesn't seem unreasonable to read "Milk Thistle" as a song about suicide-via-whiskey). "Milk thistle, milk thistle, let me down slow," he trembles. "If I go to heaven I'll be bored as hell." It feels like a fitting, if morbid, way to end a record about escaping life-- about escaping everything.
