From unassuming Omaha, Neb., comes an indie-rock supergroup expressing disgust and indignant frustration in the best way it knows how: catchy high-energy rock music with an edge. The debut album of new musical project Desaparecidos, "Read Music / Speak Spanish," is equal parts rock, pop and social rage.
Translating the Spanish into English, Desaparecidos means "the disappeared ones." The name refers to South American dissidents who have been kidnapped by their governments and thrown from planes into the ocean. Aligning themselves with such a ... disturbing (to say the least) ... practice gives the band members a very heavy stick to carry. But it also means that, as American dissidents, they expect to be taken just as seriously as their South American counterparts. In any case, Desaparecidos is an appropriate enough name for a band so dissatisfied with the status quo that its album indicts pretty much every American cultural construct of this consumerist-oriented generation.
Fronted by Bright Eyes singer/songwriter Conor Oberst, the rest of Desaparecidos consists of mostly Saddle Creek Records musicians, several of whom have worked together before. Denver Dalley turns up on guitar, Landon Hedges (of The Good Life) on bass and backup vocals, Ian McElroy on keyboards and Matt Baum on drums. McElroy and Baum have both toured with Oberst before as Bright Eyes. Dalley has worked with Joe Knapp of Son, Ambulance, who just released an album of Bright Eyes/Son, Ambulance collaborations. And so on. In summary, Desaparecidos is the bastard child of a few incestuous Saddle Creek musicians looking for action at the same time.
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Oberst has a tremendous talent for putting together thematically cohesive albums full of passionate, embittered lyrics that expose his tender and misunderstood heart. From Bright Eyes, Oberst's main musical project, we get lyrics about fevers, mirrors and some made-up girl named Arienette (she's real, he swears). With Desaparecidos, Oberst switches it up, primarily penning songs condemning America's malls, dollar signs and urban sprawl.
His style stays the same, though. Oberst strings as many words into his songs as possible, his run-on verses interrupted only by impatient gasps of breath and typically building up to nicely placed throbs of woe. With Bright Eyes, Oberst's vocals are the primary focus, underlaid by spiderwebs of acoustic guitar and/or rambling spirals of piano. Desaparecidos' searing guitars and bass-heavy choruses turn Oberst into a punk rock howler instead of a whiny emo kid whose life is too much for him. Add the blatant social commentary, and "Read Music / Speak Spanish" turns out to be quite a departure for Oberst.
Desaparecidos confronts the new American dream and calls it a nightmare. Oberst's lyrics, while not overtly politically motivated, indict housing developments and SUVs, Disney and the golden arch. "The Happiest Place on Earth" opens with "I want to pledge allegiance to the country where I live / I don't want to be ashamed to be American." That about sums up the album. But the fact that all nine songs on the album point fingers at very different aspects of the commercialized-to-the-max American landscape may suggest that these guys are on to something more than just 40 minutes of good music.
Oberst shrieks of "coca cola trickling down [his] throat" and "inequality franchised" on "$$$$." On "Greater Omaha," Dalley's electric guitar riffs pound in and out of a catchy hook while the lyrics lament restaurants per capita, traffic, color schemes - all the familiar factors of suburbia.
Desaparecidos speaks against that ubiquitous "they" - you know, the corporate executives who run the Starbucks and McDonald's franchises and keep the Wal-Marts coming ("$$$$") - and for the blue-collar workers who have to work two jobs ("Man and Wife, the Former"). More importantly, the band speaks for all of us who are dissatisfied with pre-cooked fast food, predigested television and the constant need for more parking.
While the endeavor is much appreciated, Desaparecidos' censure of everything all of the time gets hyperbolic and heavy-handed at times, even for a supergroup from Omaha. Thankfully, hope is offered in "Manana," the sole optimistic song on the album. "Manana" features Oberst's neck veins popping out from screaming so loud and in such earnest: "Tomorrow is blank / We'll just fill it in with our own answers." On an album so focused on what is wrong with this picture, "Manana" gives us something that's right - the appealing, if unrealistic, potential for a new future.
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