End Times lyrics/killer vocal hooks
By Andy Smetanka
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Whatever else can be said about Missoula’s longest-lasting pop band, Oblio Joes have never gone wrong by sticking to what they know, and what they’re best at, which is ragged, rambling, shimmering and shambling romantic mid-tempo pop with End Times lyrics and killer vocal hooks. The songs get more distinctively Oblio Joesian with every new album (Swallow the Moon is their third proper full-length), but in some ways, after all this time, they’re still just adding new verses to the same epic song that came to singer/songwriter/guitarist John Brownell in a cough-syrup haze 10 years ago.
Brownell, I think, is the most gifted songwriter in Missoula. But his songs usually shift between the same two, maybe three gears (which is to say, the same two or three Dan Strachan beats). The Band No One Could Hurry has never played this briskly, and, as a lyricist, Brownell has come a long way from the recurring on-the-lam fixation of every third Oblios song circa All Ages Show. Still, I don’t get the feeling of a journey in progress—more like an orbit. Like a groove on an LP that reveals new pleasures even as it keeps inscribing itself, getting smaller and smaller, going round and round and round.
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