Conor Oberst

Ruminations

Musically spare, verbally intense solo record from Bright-Eyed Nebraskan.

Recorded under the snows of an Omaha winter, Ruminations makes a feature of its isolation. Echoing Conor Oberst’s early Dylan-Wunderkind days, it features the Bright Eyes/ Desaparecidos frontman alone with piano, harmonica and guitar, putting down songs he never quite intended as an album. This sparseness means that the focus on Oberst is tight – maybe too tight for those who have previously viewed his confessional beatnik persona with wariness. Yet just when overload seems imminent, he delivers yet another undeniably sharp line about mortality or modernity, confronting his past, present and future head on. There’s lots of illness, lots of death, especially on remarkable mourning-song A Little Uncanny (“I miss Christopher Hitchens/I miss Oliver Sacks”) and sheer indulgent mind-spill couldn’t account for the painful, medical-textbookclear dissections of Tachycardia or Counting Sheep. He could still afford to ease up on the harmonica, though.