Jim O'Rourke

^ 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.

weird that people get that general idea about him when he comes across as incredibly gracious and affable in that recent interview posted above:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3z8twRBz24

well, yeah, like a lot of people, he contains multitudes

well yeah, i just think it's interesting that he's got that reputation in the media when it seems like every interview i've heard or read with him gives me the opposite impression. almost feels like with what he's addressing in that interview with people mistaking his unreliable-narrator voice in insignificance as being "him" or everyone assuming he's working in the film industry in japan.

not claiming to have any inside route to him as a person in general.

that interview feels really stilted. interviewer sounds oddly impatient/bored.

yeah exactly, that's what makes o'rourke seem completely unlike the cantankerous/curmudgeonly person i'd been lead to believe he was. sounds like he's being interviewed by a 15 year-old for their school newspaper and he's actually actively trying to help the clueless guy out and entertaining all these drab questions.

yeah, interview is odd, and o'rourke seems nice (if very nerdy).

Hotel Blue sounding right today, haven't played this album in months. Also, don't understand the complaints about 'out of tune' bowed cymbals on The Visitor.. everything sounds in order, functional, on the album. Still love the 12 minute mark, or maybe it's 12'30"...

"functional": exactly. it's a showreel extravaganza. not out of tune. just always imagine a better key for that passage. "better" is a subjective judgement. y'all free to love the key it's in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olXUf4dDLS4

Wow the bit he plays starting at 8:57 sounds a lot like one of my own:

https://soundcloud.com/factual-1/open

Now you just need a masked wrestler to preface your work with a personalized SWOT analysis.

fuck

does anyone live in Tokyo?

http://www.tinymixtapes.com/news/jim-orourke-perform-simple-songs-and-bad-timing-their-entirety

recent live show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM1RGmBQjww
sounds great, wonder if a world tour is in the works? :P
apparently he's got a solo acoustic LP coming out next year on VDSQ which is good news.

all downhill from here live!!! fuck

Thanks Tyler, that sounds great - really like the pretty droney swirly interlude about ten minutes in - very Dark Star! I miss this kind of stuff on Simple Songs.

Another slightly dispiriting interview here:
http://bombmagazine.org/article/9761825/jim-o-rourke

Whoa, acoustic album eh? Would not have thought that was coming. Nice.

Also, I am pretty sure that at this point I am not interested in hearing Jim talk about his own work. It just ... does not help.

haha yeah...
no idea what to expect about the solo acoustic thing. for some reason i kind of doubt it'll be along the lines of the solo playing on bad timing, but who knows?

he sounds like such a miserable bastard