Bright Eyes

Once tagged "rock's boy genius" by the music press, Conor Oberst turned 27 on February 15th and even without that in mind it's hard to listen to Cassadaga without hearing a newfound sophistication to the Bright Eyes sound. Producer, multi-instrumentalist and permanent band member Mike Mogis has crafted a swirling, euphonious record, at times bursting with bombastic confidence and country swagger, and at others loose-limbed and mesmeric. Trumpet and piano player Nate Walcott, a Bright Eyes player since 2003 and now the third permanent member, is responsible for the cinematic string arrangements.

Other than a handful of live appearances and the release of a collection of B-sides & rarities, Bright Eyes kept mostly out of sight in 2006 after the busy 2005 which saw the simultaneous release of the sister albums Digital Ash In A Digital Urn and I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. Should you have looked for them you'd have found them tucked away in various studios around the country. Recording for the first time outside of the Lincoln, NE studio belonging to Mogis, the Bright Eyes cast of players were busy in studios in Portland, OR, New York City, Chicago and Los Angeles. The result is the band's most confident work so far, an album so full of soaring strings and female harmonies that it feels almost buoyant in comparison to previous releases. While many latched onto the smattering of political commentary in 2005's I'm Wide Awake..., Cassadaga is less blunt in its depiction of youthful exasperation in the Bush era. References to Hurricane Katrina, holy wars and polar ice-caps may crop up, but they're buried deep amongst the ruminations on life, love, history, death and the afterlife.

If I’m Wide Awake... was "the New York City album", then Cassadaga is "the America album", in which Oberst diaries his travels around the country and articulates his sense of history in the landscape. In first single "Four Winds" he is "off to old Dakota where genocide sleeps/in the Black Hills, the Badlands, the calloused East/I buried my ballast, I made my peace." Cassadaga itself crops up in the same song. The town, a community for psychics in central Florida, is visited in order to "commune with the dead". This wandering spirit is crystalized in "I Must Belong Somewhere" a song which was already a staple of live shows by the end of the 2005. "Hot Knives" is particularly spirited, bringing to mind the true energy of a Bright Eyes show. Likewise, "Soul Singer In A Session Band" - a rousing paean to an oxymoronic profession - enlists all of the elements which make the Bright Eyes live band such a euphoric experience. "Make A Plan To Plan To Love Me" is Bright Eyes at their most playful; a straight-up love song, replete with girl group vocals and Burt Bacharach strings. Oberst, the fumbling guitarist whose impassioned prose tumbles out under stark stage spotlights, is still recognizable in every track, but the songs are rich with elaborate production, cinema-sized orchestration and, at times, sprawling, almost psychedelic, atmospherics.

The line up of Bright Eyes players includes Andy LeMaster (Now It's Overhead), Ben Kweller, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Janet Weiss (ex-Sleater Kinney), Jason Boesel (Rilo Kiley), John McEntire (Tortoise) M.Ward, Maria Taylor and Rachael Yamagata.

Oakley Hall
Oakley Hall is a 6 piece electric string band who draws from the tradition of The Byrds (Gram Parsons/ Clarence White-eras), Flying Burrito Brothers, Neil Young (On the Beach-era), Douglas Sahm (Sir Douglas Quintet) and other California country bands. Somehow, they put all of this past stuff together and produce something new. The band features Papa Crazee from Oneida, Greg from The Broke Review on Drums and Rachel Cox on guitar and vocals. This pedigree is evident on most songs. She’s the real deal. To compare them to the mid-nineties NoDepression bands is a grave mistake. People immediately think of this certain type of sound when they hear a set of influences. The knee jerk is that they will sound like Whiskey Town or earlier Wilco or the other stuff. This isn’t fair to Oakley Hall. What Oakley Hall is doing is something completely different than what those bands did although the verbage in the description might be similar. Attitude? Presentation? I don’t know. There’s an “otherness” at work that is very critical.
--from New York music blog newyorksurf.com

McCarthy Trenching
Dan McCarthy has spent the past five years playing and touring with his friends’ bands, including Mayday, Neva Dinova, The Good Life, Orenda Fink, Maria Taylor, Bright Eyes and others. He has also been heard on a number of Nebraska bands’ recordings, from Cursive’s “Happy Hollow” (playing piano) to Tilly and the Wall’s “Bottoms of Barrels” (playing accordion). McCarthy Trenching is not what he does on the side; it’s what he does all the time.

McCarthy Trenching’s self-titled album is the distillation of two collections of songs. Old Habits, recorded in November of 2003 by Ted Stevens, was a self-released nine-song collection of drinking songs and waltzes. The dipsomaniacal It’s Got Nothing to Do with the Drinking was recorded in the winter of 2005-2006, and had been given to only a handful of family and friends before Team Love expressed interest in releasing a ‘best of what you’ve put on tape so far.’