The Gall of America

It was 2002 when my friend Mike Robb came to New York and forced me to get into the Mountain Goats and Bright Eyes. I fell for the MGs as soon as I heard the first song. He started me off with "Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" so he knew what he was doing. (I later used it to re-launch this site as an MP3 blog.) Bright Eyes, on the other side of crippled creek, were just OK but not worthy of priority parking. I liked the EPs Every Day and Every Night and 3 New Hit Songs but didn't feel so compelled to do the months-long obsessive absorption of all recorded Conor Oberst material like one gets with some bands.

Then I heard his Desaparecidos album and the piñata exploded with all kinds of goodness. It was like, let's make a whole album of songs like "A Perfect Sonnet" but really rock that shit out. Predictably, it was panned by Pitchfork in one of their trademark bite-n-bark reviews, though I can't disagree with the line about "the distortion-heavy setting at least makes Oberst's emotional breakdown vocal theatrics seem somewhat more believable." He's a drama-scream for sure.

Anyway, turned out that the Mountain Goats and Desaparecidos were playing in town the same week (separate bills) that July so my friend high-tailed it back down from New Hampshire. We got to see JD do The Mountain Goats/Extra Glenns with Franklin Bruno at Sound and Fury Records on Ludlow and then Village Underground a couple days later. The in-store appearance was around 6pm the same day as the Desaparecidos show at North Six so it was easy to hit both.

I remember bumping into a friend at S&F who said he was going to the North Six show too and his girl companion whispered, "don't tell anyone, it's a guilty pleasure." Huh? I guess I was riding in the granny lane on the outer-loop since I didn't realize the Conor Oberst backlash was way past "does anyone wanna go faster?!?" No matterhorn, it was still a great show and he didn't project the overly affected mopey emo kid I saw in pictures but rather he took the stage quite sure of himself with clean-cut hair neatly parted to the side. My friend noted, "he looks like a little Kennedy family member."

Desaparecidos - "Manana" / "Greater Omaha"