throwback thursday: desaparecidos
Desaparecidos are back! If you are not excited about this then you may as well stop reading now. If you don’t know who the Desaparecidos are but want to be excited, read on!
Desaparecidos are the side project of Conor Oberst (from Bright Eyes) and some other guys – most notably besides Conor being Denver Dalley who was in a good but often overlooked band called Statistics (then he also played in Sean Na Na with Har Mar Superstar which I found weird for some reason…). Denver is the tall one!
Anyway they put out one record – Read Music/Speak Spanish – in 2002 and toured a little and then called it quits. The record is political in content, punk in tone and sound and I think it is near perfect. Sure the politics are a bit hit or miss but otherwise this record makes you want to rage against the machine in all the right ways.
Reviewers, however, were not as impressed. I remember one in particular that accused Conor basically of reading Naomi Klien’s No Logo, getting fired up, and making a juvenile, angst-y record. As if that’s a bad thing. But, alas, many reviewers do not like the real world intruding on their music. Or to say it another way, hipsters are over politics.
Bullshit.
I was lucky enough to see them twice. The first was in Houston at the now defunct Mary Janes and they were so good, I drove to Austin to see them at the also sort of now defunct Emo’s the next night as well. One of the best decisions of my life. Somewhere I have a VHS tape of that Austin show…
Shortly thereafter Denver (I think) jumped off the drums at one show and broke his arm and the band broke up. Until now!
So far there is only one date – the Maha Festival in Omaha on 8/11 – but we can sure hope for more. Maybe even a new record???
The entire record is great and it is hard to pick just one song but let’s go with this one: “The Happiest Place On Earth.”
it was released as a single and while it is hard to say what song is the best, this one is a jam and it goes well with the current state of our country. Fuck capitalism! And I am not at all being ironic when I say that…
Today’s Throwback Thursday comes courtesy of Dan Sharber, who saw Fugazi at the Axiom in 1987. You can find him on facebook or go find his old Makeout Club profile.
!!! One of my favorite all-time totally under-appreciated (and/or unknown) records! I actually think this might be Conor Oberst’s best stuff. You can definitely see how some of the work on this record made its way into Lifted. Thanks for spreading the word on new material. Very exciting especially after the rumors of a Smiths reunion have been squashed. Win some, lose some.
i totally agree! i used to get in arguments with bright eyes lovers about whether desaparecidos were better. they would get super mad at me… i am a huge bright eyes fan as well so it was all in good fun. and yeah johnny marr has basically said the smiths reunion will never ever ever happen. sucks. but seeing desaparecidos again would be fantastic. they were so fun live and that record still gets me pumped even at my advanced age! glad you enjoyed the post!
- dan
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