Rock against Sprawl

I picked up “Read Music - Speak Spanish” from Conor Oberst’s (of Bright Eyes and Winona Ryder fame) project, Desaparecidos. Nothing extraordinarily interesting about the music. But I’ve been craving a good rawk fix and the weepy Nebraskan delivered. Fans of Jawbreaker, Avail, Quicksand, and At the Drive In will not be disappointed. And while railing against consumerism is hardly groundbreaking, the band’s genuine disgust about how they’re “moving dirt to make a Greater Omaha” is powerful stuff. The packaging of the CD is great. The cover just shows a two lane highway cutting through empty planes. But a thin, transparent overlay (just like Modest Mouse’s “Build Nothing Out of Something”) hints to the future of this of this empty prairie. The CD booklet is the Omaha City Planning Department Recommendation Report - January 26, 2000. The purpose of the report is to clear the subdividing of 120 acres into 320 lots. After each track listing is a land-use topic. For example, following track four, “Man and Wife, the latter” is “Grading and Drainage,” which mandates that an erosion and sediment control plan must be developed and implemented prior to grading the site… The sanctimonious whining on this record can be annoying, of course. And some of the lyrics are just embarassing: “I want to pledge allegiance to the country where I live. I don’t want to be ashamed to be American…” There is even a song dissing, gasp, the Mall of America. Pitchfork’s review of the CD summed it up pretty well, “I bet anyone ten dollars that Naomi Klein’s No Logo is sitting on Oberst’s bedside table right this second.”

July 18th, 2003