Review: Conor Oberst – Salutations
Conor Oberst’s 2016 album Ruminations was starkly different to anything he had released before.
Recorded in just 48 hours, it was made up of 10 songs featuring just guitar or piano, harmonica, and vocals. Normally backed by a full band, this stripped back approach and bleak lyrical content focussed on unsavoury self-reflection made Oberst sound more alone than he had on any previous album.
The songs felt extremely personal and gave listeners insight into a seemingly very dark period of the artist’s life.
Oberst’s newest album Salutations has flipped Ruminations on its head. The album consists of the same ten songs from its predecessor; shuffled around and mixed in with seven brand new ones, clocking it in at more than an hour in length.
With a band behind him once more, Oberst has reinvented the songs of Ruminations from down-trodden ballads of solitude into a far more colourful and exciting listening experience.
Salutations opens with a brand new track, Too Late to Fixate. Its soaring chorus harmonies and dense instrumentation sets the mood for the rest of the album.
This is immediately followed by Gossamer Thin, originally track three on the prior album. Despite the lyrical content still reflecting Oberst’s on-going struggles with mental illness, the overall production of the song accompanied by strings, accordion and percussion parts has brought a surprisingly warmer feel to it.
Lyrics from the song, “ego and I.D, the essential self/you are who you are and you are someone else,” conjure a likely unintended comparison between the two versions of the song.
Oberst has made some minor changes to the lyrics in some songs from the previous record. On Salutations however, Oberst names the children and changes the malevolent sounding verse to “Little Louise drowned in a pool/Billy got killed walking to school/hope it was quick, hope it was peaceful.” This rewriting of lyrics could be reflective of the different mental states Oberst was in during the recording and production process of each album.
Not all songs work as well with a full band as they did previously. The second last track from Ruminations; You All Loved Him Once tells the tragic tale of a man abandoned by his once loyal friends and followers in a time of need.
On the prior album, the song is gut wrenching and guilt inspiring, comprised of nothing more than Oberst’s trembling voice accompanied by an acoustic guitar and cut up by screeching harmonica parts between verses.
The version on Salutations feels like it has taken all of the sting out of what was originally a very moving piece, Oberst sounds steadier and more composed and the addition of guitar solos and percussion cause the narrative of the man left behind to ultimately lose its credibility.
All in all, Salutations is a very strong sibling album to Ruminations, however both are also strong releases independent of each other. The newer tracks on Salutations are a little more hope-inspiring than the original 10, and help to break up the darker mood evoked by Ruminations. What Oberst has essentially created is an album that can be listened to differently to suit the mood of the listener.
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