CDVS: Orso Vs. Beck

At some point in the early '90s, I felt a queasy, transitional sensation. It was like being gently but firmly slapped awake, bleary-eyed, the last strains of preciously unexamined youth dying out in a crude crossfade with some new post-everything noise that held so much marvelous, worldly promise as to seem untrustworthy to a paranoid humanist ideologue like me. TV commercials had swung from their origins in slick yet still humble salesmanship to overweening, faux-surrealist montages daring me to ask why. Music was sick of itself too. The intricate spires of '80s craft-pop collapsed into stop-trying-and-just-roll-the-tape "alternative." Pop culture was bitter, ashamed of its naiveté. It spent a couple of years wounded, and then several more picking at scabs of empty, ironic detachment; witness Reality Bites.

Now, legions of artists are doing fresh things, and in good faith. But I still brace anxiously when I hear something simple (inane?) and pretty (cutesy?), sung in a heartfelt (cloying?) quaver--particularly when it's done by a deep-voiced man (disaffected asshole?). Like I said--paranoid. After all the critical carnage wrought by default doubt and overexamination in the last 10 years, I'm surely leery of anything that would evoke in me memories of PBS children's programming, circa 1975--"What are your intentions toward my nostalgia, good sir?" Well, albums like Orso's My Dreams Are Back help me let go. Originally from slowcore pioneers Rex, Phil Spirito and friends have essentially worked up a chamber-folk quartet of banjo, double bass, strings and an alto sax that thinks it's an oboe. The effect is one of breezy idyll--with just a dusting of dissonance--that calls to mind those melancholy cartoon vignettes on "Sesame Street" they used to place between sessions of stupid kids talking to Oscar.

Regarding slowcore: Spirito's efforts may have indirectly birthed the term itself, but the impulse had its more modern roots at least a few years earlier with Beck. 1994's One Foot in the Grave was a pared-down, mostly calm, twang foray no less authentic than Orso's. But it was Beck. His goofy, now readily recognizable paw prints are all over the record. Alas, it came out the same year as that smarmy Winona Ryder flick that jerked us around, and now I have to forgive myself for seeing Beck's stormtrooper helmet and hearing him drone about "plastic in the afterlife" and wondering, "Whose pulse does this brat think he's found?" He'd found mine. Music was in good hands then, and it still is. Maybe I'll relax eventually. --Dave Surratt