Out to Lunch

The Many Sides of Conor Oberst
Conor Oberst And The Mystic Valley Band + Sky Larkin

Out go the summer festivals and… in come the club concerts! Last Wednesday was my first after summer concert gig. For starters I had me a very traditional old fashioned 70’s Dylanesk country rock outfit by rock’s boy genius Conor Oberst aka Bright Eyes. He’s presently touring under his own name with The Mystic Valley Band to promoter his latest album.
It was the first time that I actually saw him play live, even though I’m a fan for quite a while now. I really like his voice but I had my doubts if he could deliver it live. Boy, was I wrong. He was a bit sick, a cold and a nasty cuff, but that didn’t affect his voice. He can really run the shivers down your spine, especially in the more quiet acoustic songs.

Listening back to the record, these versions recorded in a studio somewhere down in Mexico are mere shadows of the live versions.

It took them a couple of songs to get into it, but from then on they did a real effort to make it a swell evening, despite of the rockstar's cold. Maybe because he likes the Botanique club in Brussels (he said so).

Cape Canaveral
Danny Callahan
Lenders In The Temple
NYC – Gone, Gone
Milk Thistle

The support act was a young indie band from the UK called Sky Larkin. I checked their myspace page and it really sounded great, but live it sounded a bit plain. The balance was not right. Too much guitar and too little voice as it is often the case with young indie bands. They all like to hide behind a wall of noise. But hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.

They’ve made a nice cover of a QOTS song, I Was A Teenage Handmodel, but they didn’t play it, but they played this one.

Sky Larkin – Molten