Lifted, Or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground

Lifted was actually released, without fanfare, last August. But the fact that its creator, Conor Oberst from Omaha, Nebraska, was recently voted 14th-Coolest Musician Alive, and that his famously visceral, loose-cannon live show is headed here next week, are reasons enough to run back and grab what is surely one of the albums of the year with both hands.

This is not comfort listening. Wordy, painfully intelligent, prone to spittle-gobbed rants and inexplicable heights and depths of despair and joy, Oberst's closest songwriting ancestor is Elliott Smith (who now suddenly seems well-adjusted, emotionally remote and in need of a nap in comparison). Sonically, the album ranges from dictaphone snapshots from the backs of late-night buses to massive Wagnerian distortions of Badly Drawn Boy-style exultation. Songs unfold over eight-minute periods, funny/deathly-serious and positively baroque with instrumentation, and everybody involved (a record-sleeve headcount numbers 38 musicians) plays like they’re on the Titanic, post-lifeboat assignment.

Most arrestingly, Oberst’s voice is an angry, insomniac, teeth-clenched, stomach-achey tremor, the sound of someone writing, erasing and rewriting a suicide note until the paper tears. His words don’t stop, can’t stop, they flow livid and alarming and ungrabbable as blood.

If you suspect this is mere teenagerish melodrama (incredibly, Oberst is a mere 22 and this is his fourth album), well, it is. We just stop being this straight with ourselves when we’re older, that’s all. “My eyes are wet with clarity,” spits Conor. At least someone’s vision is still 20/20.