Jim O'Rourke - Simple Songs (2015)

2015, and the silence has been broken with Simple Songs. Jim O'Rourke is ready to talk to you again. First, he wants you to know he's not dead - yet. But you're not, either - and really, what have you done lately? Certainly not made your first pop album since 2001 - and even if you had, it probably wasn't any good. Meanwhile Simple Songs is more than just a first of anything since whenever! It's an amazing record of musical song entertainment - because Jim O'Rourke knows what he wants and how to get it...musically, that is. The rest of the world is still a mystery and a bottomless source of aggravation for the old boy. What do we care? We get a great new album out of it.
Yes, Simple Songs is an album of songs sung by Jim O'Rourke all the way through! It has been ten years since Jim's voice rang out from a new album. Ah, when James Michael was just a wee lad, he sang all the time, with a lovely little lilt to his voice, like all the children do. But the songs he sang gave his parents no end of consternation: "Great Decei-verrr! Cigarettes, ice cream, figurines...of the Vir-gin Mar-eeee!" Aye, if only we'd-a been there - little Jimmy's career would have started much sooner. Child labor laws be damned! It's hard to believe it has been nearly fourteen years since Insignificance. When that album hit in late 2001, we heard once or twice how it was too bad that it wasn't Eureka Part 2. Sissies! Then in 2009, when The Visitor returned Jim to the orchestrated instrumental feel of Bad Timing, people wondered when we'd have another album like Insignificance! Grrrr....now, has the world caught up with Jim? Maybe - but only because he let us.

What Simple Songs sounds like.... At this point, the range of sounds and songs that have turned Jim's head are numerous enough to have crushed together into something that is unmistakably his - the vast, glossy and glittering O'Rourkian (yes, like Kervorkian) wall of sound. The music's got OCD quality, played so immaculately by so many instruments, and most of them by the creator's hand. This time's really the widest screen yet for Jim's popular song-style, truly breathtaking! As for the songs themselves, one may have to resist the urge to skim the lyrics to try and guess who the target of each ditty might be - but this ain't "You're So Vain," okay kids? And you're definitely NOT Warren Beatty.

Simple Songs was worked over, from source material to finished mix, for five years or more now. Jim's writing is kinda rooted in the approach of Insignificance - frosted pop tarts that leave a darkly bitter aftertaste. So bilious not even Jim can listen to it all the way through! Fine, it's not for him to listen to anymore - WE can't stop from listening. It's like a beautiful car wreck we can't look away from or stop feeling AMAZING about. Super fun stuff.

Let Simple Songs seep into your brain, as a musical expression and a statement of animal motherhood. It may help you get your bearings in a world gone hopeless. Most of all though, don't hate this or he'll go away again for another decade! Jim's got just what the world needs now - but who needs you?