A paranoid Pink Floyd-ian wonder
By Gabino Travassos
Each song is a story, regardless of who writes it. In the case of Montana's longest-reigning undiscovered art-rock five-tet, each song is a paranoid Pink Floyd-ian wonder, a mixture of Asimov and The Twilight Zone and They Might Be Giants, sung with an earnestness and quirkiness akin to your Lemonheads or Camper van Beethovens. In "Captain of the Moon" songwriter John Brownell manages to get "inexorable" into the line before "giant space balloon". In "The Hope of Even Seeing You", which in other hands would have been an awful love-song, he ends with "Between shots of morphine, you float through the room ethereally. And whether you're real or a dream is immaterial to me." There are no easy rhymes. No big power rock choruses. Just well-intentioned layers of drums, guitars, pianos, handclaps, and the usual "la-la-la"s, all sung a little too fast to make a first listen at all comprehensible. Time changes, minimalist bridges, synthy codas, harmonies and a knack for the absurd. "Disembodied Voice" is full of ghostly regret, the chorus in "Still Life With Pear" is lush, the second chorus followed by an extended instrumental breakdown.
On the down side, there's a little less "Missoula" in this CD. No yetis or songs about mountain men. This band could be a group of any five guys from any campus. The title track is probably the thinnest and weakest Oblio Joes song ever, probably due to the overall quietness and the small and predictable upsurges. They win you back with "It's On the Fridge", and the remaining four songs are genius.
I'm sure I could have found something to dislike about their 2001 release "Sin Tax and Some Antics", or 1996's slendid "Lo!", but the ratio of exceptional to subpar is unusually high. It's almost time for the annual Oblio Joes pilgrimage to Spokane and Olympia and other points in the Pacific MidWest, make sure you get out to see them.
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