Conor assembled a special band in Mexico for this recording, known amongst themselves and to friends as The Mystic Valley Band. Members include Nate Walcott, Jason Boesel, Macey Taylor, Nik Freitas, and Taylor Hollingsworth. The result is his first solo album in thirteen years, following "Water" (1993), "Here's To Special Treatment" (1994), and "Soundtrack To My Movie" (1995). In that time, he's recorded and performed in Commander Venus, Park Ave., Desaparecidos, and most notably Bright Eyes, his main musical vehicle for the past decade.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Favorite this year
Comment: No doubt he's a great songwriter. Now, with this one, he's become one of the best. This is his best album to date. Lucid, clean, relaxed and as always, well done. Maybe his Highway 61 Revisited. From the opening Cape through I don't want to die in a hospital and on to the end every song is more listenable top to bottom than any of his other albums.
Bright Eyes is good stuff but top to bottom too deliberate and self-aware for my tastes. This has a few raggedy edges, plenty of pop freshness, and a hundred layers of just plain great songwriting.
Conor is at his absolute best here.
My personal favorite this year.
Jim H.
Author
A Bottle of Rain
Nowhere Near the Sea of Cortez
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good album
Comment: I love all the Bright Eyes albums so I bought this and have been happy with it. It didn't immediately grab me the way some of this other work did, but still a good and enjoyable album.
Customer Rating: Summary: Thoughtful and Intimate, but not Flawless
Comment: "Cape Canaveral" blew me away from the instant I heard it. The opening track epitomizes what modern folk music is about: image-heavy, personal, intimate, and giving us a hint about how Sam Beam would sound if he were darker and more confessional. This song may be worth the price of the CD.
I was lying down while I gave this album its first listen-through, and "Lenders in the Temple" made me sit up with a start. The riff and vocalization (not the voice, but the pronunciation and double-tracked delivery) sounded so much like the late indie-icon Elliott Smith that for the briefest of moments, I forgot what I was listening to. It's a wonderful, haunting song.
Other standout songs: "Get-Well-Cards" and "I Don't Want to Die (in the Hospital)".
There are some definite throw-away tracks on this album. "Eagle on a Pole" drags. Its lyrics are beautiful, but Conor should've saved it for a book of poems. "Danny Callahan" is another piece that completely falls flat.
The overall ambiance and subtle production is wonderful, but this album gets a little slow. While Conor Oberst is frequently compared to Bob Dylan, here, without the lush background orchestration he had in "I'm Wide Awake", his songwriting muscle occasionally shows itself to be a little weak. Sometimes the gentle subtlety and straightforwardness gives way to boring and slow. Still, for the few great tracks on here, it's probably worth your money.
Customer Rating: Summary: 3.5 Stars.... A detour or a new beginning?
Comment: Conor Oberst has been recording for many, many years as the essentially one-man band Bright Eyes (surrounded by an ever-changing cast of support personnel). Last we heard from Bright Eyes was last year's excellent "Cassadega" album. Seemingly out of nowhere, Oberst decided to change direction and he went to Mexico to hole up and record a new album under his own name, obviously purposly so. (And let me add my disgust that Amazon is billing this as "Conor Oberst by Bright Eyes", just horrible.)
"Conor Oberst" (12 tracks, 42 min.) is an oddity in many ways. First of all, the album title: is this an announcement of something that we hadn't seen or heard before? A departure from Bright Eyes? The first track "Cape Canaveral" doesn't make that clear, as it showcases the pensive Conor we know and love. But as the tracks rolls on, the musical texture of the album is indeed different from the Bright Eyes we know: a lot more country and rambling-oriented for one thing, check out "I Don't Want to Die (In the Hospital)", which you couldn't imagine as a Bright Eyes track. Another example of that are "NYC-Gone Gone" and "Souled Out!!!", both hard-rocking tracks with electric guitars up in your face, but I actually like the latter one quite a lot. That said, there are a lot of tracks that remind me of Bright Eyes as well, such as "Eagle On a Pole" and the closer "Milk Thistle" (the latter just Conor on acoustic guitar).
In all, this is not a bad album for sure, but not a great one either, as it doesn't offer a lot of truly memorable tracks that stay with you upon listening. And it stumps me. Is this album a detour for Conor? Or a new beginning, discarding Bright Eyes? I guess only the future will tell. And given Conor's prolific output, I'm guessing we won't have to wait that long to find out.
Customer Rating: Summary: As great as I hoped for.
Comment: Conor Oberst's solo album did not let me down. The 1st 2 tracks as stellar.
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