Favorite Albums: 2000-2004
2. Desaparecidos, Read Music/Speak Spanish
Original position on my Stylus ballot: #1
Things I did not (and in some cases could not have) mentioned in my review of this album for the Voice, the first piece I ever had published outside of central PA, sent as a spec to the editor months earlier and eventually published alongside the review of a new Bright Eyes album.
1) Lincoln is the capital of Nebraska, not Omaha. Whoops!
2) Hilariously, this album was initially a hip-hop project before they remembered 311 or whatever, which you can kind of hear in some of the lyrics.
3) There’s a moment near the end of each song where Conor Oberst and the boys start screaming like their mouths are full of peanut butter and they just learned their dog isn’t coming back. A lot of older rock fans in my experience will skip forward at that point, if they haven’t already.
4) This is one of those albums that I wasn’t sure would hold up when I matured past the perspective it comes from (“a small-town bohemian seeing the world and those around him homogenizing before his eyes,” as I kind of redundantly put it). After all, I’m married in a metropolis and heading off to an MBA program almost nine years after I wrote the review, and Oberst lets you know he’s be scared shitless of such a life on track one. But I have no reason to belief my anxieties about Our Culture will decrease as I find myself further immersed in it, and odds are I’ll always appreciate a pop punk platter where “golden arch” rhyming with “MARCH! MARCH! MAAAAAARCH!” is about as vague as it gets (…Green Day). It’s the songs about nothing that probably need to watch out. My time is precious now.
