Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Conor Oberst and The Mystic Valley

After filling ourselves with burgers and fries, we headed over to Richards' on Richards where good ol' Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley were going to play. We were pretty anxious to see him and were disappointed to find out there was an opening band called...Dree? (I
dont even know...she muffled her name once and Conor Oberst yelled it about 6 times but all I could make out was Dree). Anyways, she wasn't that great. There was a little too much echoing and "ooo-ing". Also, some obnoxious lamewads unfortunately placed themselves behind us. It seemed like they thought they were at a hockey game instead of at a Conor Oberst concert. When Jenny told one of them to back off, he responded "you're at a rock n' roll concert. If you didn't want someone on you, you should be at the back" Wait a minute...I definitely wouldn't classify this as "rock n' roll". I would take that comment into consideration if we were at an actual "rock" concert but I think you may be lost budday. And I liked how Conor Oberst coincidentally played a slow song after the lamewad made that comment which pretty much shut him up.

Oberst and the Mystic Valley's first four to five songs were well-played and upbeat. "Lenders in the Temple" was acoustically played by only Oberst and the keyboardist which made it eerily wonderful and enjoyable. But after that, it seemed to go slowly downhill, then peaked again when he played the frantic song "I don't want to die (in a hospital)", and then went downhill again. The reason why it went slightly downhill was because Oberst seemed to be jacked up on something. He spat on the crowd and his band, which was questionable. He also messed up on the song "Milk Thistle" and didn't provide a sufficient recovery to this mess-up.

Overall, the concert was OK but I definitely wasn't sad when it ended. I did enjoy the first half of Oberst's set and "I don't want to die (in a hospital)" but the rest of it was mediocre and at one point, it looked like Oberst was going to throw up.

Let's tuck the concert away to the side for a moment and talk about his new album. It's a self-titled album which can be streamed off his official website.
This album is pretty good. The lyrics are creative and entertaining (I think the lyrics are a lot better than Bright Eyes lyrics; Bright Eyes is a little too emo for me, no offense to all you Bright Eyes fans).
My top three songs off this album are:

Lenders in the Temple
I don't want to die (in a hospital)
Milk Thistle

Enjoy

1 comment:

kallskänkan said...

"lamewads". useful word. and your blog keeps on rocking it. That concert was a (or yeah, I didnt expect that much really) disappointment.