It’s fun to stay at the B-O-C-C…
[Video]
[6.71]
Alfred Soto: This collaboration between Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers is not as staid as its lesser moments suggest. “Dylan Thomas” isn’t one of them. Ah, Dylan Thomas — a Trojan Horse for a world where it’s easy for a person to “grow greedy with this private hell.” Oberst and Bridgers stepping on the same melodic stones can get lulling without the occasional barbs.
[7]
Crystal Leww: “Dylan Thomas” is a dense song full of self-references (and the video features even more cameos from close friends) wrapped up in maybe some commentary about our current political climate. This is the most I’ve ever enjoyed something that Conor Oberst has done, but it’s hard to follow as someone who is not super familiar with either artist’s work. I like the jangle though.
[5]
Thomas Inskeep: It’s folk rock that’s actually not afraid to rock a little! (Two, count ’em, two, guitar solos!) Phoebe Bridgers’s voice is great, and her harmonies with Conor Oberst — Conor fucking Oberst, of all people — are superb.
[8]
Tim de Reuse: I’m not sold on Oberst and Bridgers singing the same melodic lines on top of one another; their voices don’t interact in any interesting way. If anything, they step on each other’s toes, with Oberst contributing an irritating itchiness to the background, and Bridgers having to push a bit harder than she normally does to poke out of the bog-standard indie rock surroundings. There are a few nice turns of phrase in the lyrics, but it would’ve fit both the subject matter and the voices involved if things had been a little more scaled back.
[5]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I’ve found it challenging to revisit much of Oberst’s work because of his voice, but it sounds wonderful here alongside Bridgers’s. She has a way of sanding down his whininess, revealing an innate charm that’s often hard to find. The lyrics are personal, humorous, relatable — surprisingly affecting. The two embody the spirit of Dylan Thomas’s “In My Craft or Sullen Art.”
[6]
Alex Clifton: Plays as a slightly grungier, American cousin to Belle and Sebastian’s brand of literate sunshine pop, and I certainly ain’t mad about it.
[7]
Vikram Joseph: I remember 2007 so well. I remember my room in university halls with that sloping floor and the window overlooking a deer park. I remember listening to Craig Finn sing about Jack Kerouac (whose On The Road I was prone to quoting, like a twat, at the time) and John Berryman (who I’d never heard of), and I remember feeling for the first time the crushing, exhilarating weight of life intersecting art, lines traced across decades connecting art and the lives of those that made it, and the exponential possibilities that seemed to explode from this. I was naive and impressionable, and everything felt like a really big deal around then. Somehow, “Dylan Thomas” takes me back to that. Alongside Phoebe Bridgers, whose creative presence already feels so powerful, Conor Oberst sounds young and vulnerable again, over a freewheeling melody and generous, wide-open chords. They evoke the eponymous poet’s untimely passing, but only as a fleeting aside, in a song that alludes to fake news, makes self-referential jokes about Bridgers’s own album artwork, but most of all speaks to an anxiety with modern living and a sense of palpable desperation. I love the way Bridgers and Oberst’s voices sound in harmony; in their hands, “I’m getting used to these dizzy spells,” sounds almost optimistic in a wired, caffeinated sort of way. The squalling guitar solos that burst in uninvited on two separate occasions feel defiant and vital. It’s a song that makes me feel as though, even in amongst all of this chaos, those nameless, multitudinous possibilities still exist.
[9]