Jim O'Rourke

Even with the low quality stream, this album is hitting me hard. One for the year-end lists, I expect.

There's also a well-considered review that just appeared on the quietus site: http://thequietus.com/articles/17843-jim-orourke-simple-songs-review

i dig your drawings once-ler, they just took me by surprise.

halfway thru first listen, sounds most like The Visitor and Eureka. wild guitar sound of Insignificance nowhere to be found. but that album was written and recorded in a week, and this took....eight years?

..."Simple Songs" places far fewer layers between Jim and the listener. O'Rourke doesn't invite you inside his home, but he does unlock the door.

Well said.

really wish i had the lyric sheet atm

no french horn ! yay!
vdp honky tonk ! yay!
no shoehorned "this one's for all you organum lovers" middle 8 in the wrong key ! yay !
jim's singing voice. erm...

even though i get a strong "i'd really love to see you tonight" vibe from "friends with benefits", while listening to this song i have alternatingly loled nervously and thought "what a pretty song", totally love the ending
the old JOR magic!

jim's singing voice. erm...
i dunno, this album seems like he's finally comfortable singing...
and yeah, even though this seems like maybe his "approachable" and friendly album, there are still plenty of nervous lols to be had!

yeah i think his singing voice is fine
i was listening to unreleased? with fire! (lol) this morning and found it remarkably good, so i decided to check out the new JOR and found it unnerving in a smooth and pleasant and familiar classically smooth JOR kind of way

1999 Peel Session

yeahhh that is pretty excellent

I like JOR as a radio format = AOR with creepy lyrical undertones (see "In The Air Tonight", "Every Breath You Take", etc.).

sounds like a good idea but they'd have to call every station THE TRIGGER :-/

103 The Trigger

"last year" = early sam prekop / vintage gentle giant

one of the most quietly mastered albums i've heard in a while, it's more quiet than the visitor. it almost sounds as if he ran it through the "telephone" or "am radio" eq curves in Audacity. you have to really turn it up, and even then, it's nicely moderate.

we've had a rental car for the last few days. some of the tracks had my dad thrumming on the steering wheel with a moderate cockiness.. there are some muscly grooves on this.

thrumming = thumb drumming?

just like, hand drumming, with the palms, the thumbs, 7/10 digits.. maybe thrumming is the wrong word. just, drumming on the steering wheel

no shoehorned "this one's for all you organum lovers" middle 8 in the wrong key ! yay !

― massaman gai, Tuesday, May 12, 2015 8:44 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

what are some examples of this? just curious

^ request seconded

First listen and this album is amazing. It feels mature. Comparing it to the 70's makes sense. However, calling a sound this fresh ~dated~ would not make sense; so hopefully no one is doing that.

Simple songs will not go on any year end list though. That would require me to care enough about other modern music to make a list.

well if y'all can't imagine a better key for the bowed cymbal extravaganza in the visitor i despair !

man, that Peel Session is fucking great! holy shit @ the fast version of 'Halfway to a Threeway'! beats the EP version by a long shot for me. i wish there were more live / alternate / radio recordings of these JimO songs

Listening to Simple Songs properly for the first time and it's blowing me away, so much more expansive and huge than its runtime suggests

Jim in Uncut:

“Japan was the place where Eureka was actually most popular, and to this day there are neo-hippies running around with flowers telling me how it changed their life. I’m like, ‘Your life sucks, I can’t believe I had anything to do with it! It makes me so fucking depressed. I turned you into a hippy.’”

well, he still sounds like a prick. Eureka is a great fuckin record, dunno that he could ever top it. the production/mix of simple songs is so tidy, the music almost sounds too thin/small, if that's possible. same complaint with the visitor, there's an odd sterility to the music that makes it feel cold/off-putting. still, it's a good alternative to Phish.

Have we stopped talking about this already? I unabashedly love every second of this album. I expected it would be AOTY material for me, and it's easily that already; hard to imagine anything beating it.

Unexpected influences I hear on this album: Supertramp, Warren Zevon (the first song), and, err, does the melody of "These Hands" remind anyone else of "Freebird?"

Anyway, this is as good as Eureka.

Find it thin a bit thin myself. Maybe it will grow on me, but some key quotes from that Uncut interview kind of point towards why this one is perhaps not for me.

Was wrong, the quotes I was thinking of were in this Aquarium Drunkard interview, not Uncut: http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2015/05/19/jim-orourke-the-aquarium-drunkard-interview/

So what was the deal-breaker for you?

Anyone with the vinyl experiencing some extremely loud popping during the first couple minutes? Trying to figure out if these were pressed badly or if I just got unlucky.

Love the album anyway.

Ehh, no one deal-breaker, I just don't find it nearly as enjoyable as the earlier vocal-Jim records. But generally, all the quotes around this record have added to my feelings about it (all read AFTER hearing it, so really they confirmed a feeling, didn't set it). Stuff like the talk about spending six years making it (and what went into that 6 years) and the "I haven’t listened to it since I finished it ... I just have this image of being unhappy with it in the end." Basically it sounds overcooked and underinvested (not in time/devotion to a sound of course) to me, and those quotes kind of back up my feelings, but again it is just my take. Most folks, including a number of friends whose tastes I very much trust, are getting a completely different experience from the record. I just got tired of it pretty quickly while listening to it.

it feels so completely refined, perfected, devoid of blemishes. overly labored-over, but people seem to be digging it. i put it on at least once a day, maybe it's a better social record, to listen to with friends, etc.

i think it's track four, where jim really belts it out, the most full-bodied singing i've ever heard from him.

"Overly labored-over" was my initial read, OTM.

Finally got to listen to this on vinyl twice on a propa system. Yes, it seems very quiet but that must be intentional. If you do turn it up you can really heard some ~space~, my buddy did a waveform on it and there is no peak limiting. Dynamic range off the chain. AOTY, can't imagine anything will even penetrate its outer galaxy. It's just goddam lovely to have music this precise, warm, personal, sad, funny and executed at the very highest level. Shame on bands, really, is what it makes me think. Jim O a miracle in a universe of mediocrities, no wonder he checked out of Western Life.

Listened to Bad Timing on a leg of a long road trip traversing some bleak emptiness, it was magical.

i haven't listened to the whole thing but i think it's the sort of album that will be there when i need it, which is apparently not right at this particular time

“I’m glad people like ‘Eureka’,” he says, “but to me it’s a very sad record. I still meet people and they’re like, ‘I played it at my wedding, it’s so happy’, and I’m like, ‘Oh my God! People think it’s some happy, good-time record.’ So therefore, I failed. I don’t want people to be happy when they listen to my music."

good. i love this. jim o continues to rule my universe

Hah hah. I have literally never met anyone who merely thought "it's so happy" about Jim's lyric-based music. I mean, I don't think he is lying, it is just funny to imagine who these people are.

Loud popping on the first few minutes - yep. Mine jumps there too.

I'm trying to think of which Eureka song would make any sense at a wedding... "Please Patronize Our Sponsors"?

most of eureka would make sense at a wedding as long as you don't listen to the words

i mean, that nasty SNL sax solo on 'Through the Night Softly'? that's 2am running around with a lampshade on your head music!

love the record but listening to the digital version on cans makes me feel like i need to pop my ears

the vocals sound as if they're being broadcast on the radio, with that sort of fizzy compression. it's not that bad, but it sorta sounds odd. kinda dig the filtering he's got going on, with some of the piano on track three.

'through the night softly' was used for an Embassy Suites commercial. The early piano instrumental on Sam Prekop's first s/t album was used for a Tylenol commercial.

there's a '70s dadrock vibe on some of this that i am enjoying. maybe "dadrock" isn't the right term. like MOR rock that's only vaguely proggy but not rootsy either. like supertramp or something. mostly in the textures. o'rourke is the consummate allusive musician (all of his "pop" records seem like they are consciously evoking some bygone--and often out-of-fashion--style) so this doesn't surprise me.

the compression on this album (esp. the vocals) is weird, it often sounds like a thin low-bitrate MP3 even when I'm playing it from CD. o'rourke is a masterful sound engineer (among other things) so whatever effects are on here i'm assuming are deliberate. but there are some odd choices, almost like a rough mix, or like o'rourke was taking the piss on his own record (which also would not surprise me).

btw since all his other "pop" albums are named after (or in reference to) nic roeg films, what's this one a reference to? or has he abandoned that?

ah i just skimmed the online uncut interview. i guess a reference point was genesis. makes sense. listening to "last year" again, i guess i underestimated the progginess of this new one.

o'rourke is obviously a sunuvabitch (i have some stories i probably shouldn't mention here, but they don't differ in essence from a million other stories that have been shared here and elsewhere) but for me he's been something like guiding star for a long time (20 years!), in terms of the expansiveness (and strangeness) of his sensibilities.