Compare and contrast the version of The Family Radio I saw last night at The Waiting Room with the version I saw at O’Leaver’s a year ago (almost to the day) and you’re talking about two completely different bands. Nik Fackler and company are now a fully realized rock band vs. the thrown-together twee ensemble from ’06. The music is completely different. Instead of run-of-the-mill indie folk, he’s put together a sound that is ambitious if not theatrical in its intricacy. The music goes outside the boundaries of linear song structures, bordering on baroque indie prog, with influences that range from ’70s sunshine folk rock to Stravinsky to ornate chamber pop. That unbridled, unstructured approach can be rather challenging, but Fackler and Co. hold it together through sheer exuberance and a first-rate rhythm section that includes drummer Craig D. and bassist Dereck Higgins, whose own lively style adds to Fackler’s devil-may-care approach. If you’re looking for standard indie rock fare, you’re not going to find it here. Fackler’s confidence as a frontman has grown steadily without losing site of the fact that he’s really doing this for fun. He’s got a serious film career in front him, which allows him to walk that tightrope on stage without a net. That said, The Family Radio obviously has become more than a side project for Fackler. From what I saw and heard last night, it could become his main thing, if he wanted it to.

Just returning from a lengthy European tour, Eagle*Seagull was road-hardened last night, and maybe a bit road weary. I think I’ve mentioned before that they seem to be evolving into a Franz Ferdinand-style dance band. That certainly wasn’t evident during the first couple songs, which bore the same piano-driven ensemble feel that can be heard on their debut. But as the night wore on, the back-beat dance grooves kicked in. There were at least three songs that could — and should — be career-defining club hits (and that will likely be on their new album), including a simple dance number with the line “We came to dance” that will eventually find itself onto a lot of mix tapes (if that new record is ever released). Their other highlight was the set-closer, a love-song anthem with a killer chorus that was angelic.

Finally, Coyote Bones. I told you yesterday how good their soon-to-be-released debut is, and the music translates just as well live, even without the all-star contributors that flesh out the disc. Stripped down, the music is more straight-forward, cutting through the fat to reveal the songwriting meat and bone that propels this band. They could (and probably will be) the next big thing to come out of Omaha. You heard it here first at Lazy-i. I mistakenly said that their CD release show will be held down at Sokol May 5. In fact, it’ll be held at The Waiting Room May 5, with Dereck Higgins and Flowers Forever. Mark it on your calendar.

And speaking of calendars, this weekend is looking pretty solid for shows, starting tonight with Antelope, The Stay Awake and Virgasound at The Waiting Room. The real draw is that this will be the last time you’ll get to see Jeff Heater behind a drum kit with Virgasound, as one of our city’s best drummers will soon be moving out of Omaha for good. If you’ve never seen Heater before, you won’t want to miss it. Get there early. $5, 9 p.m.

As the result of a booking log-jam, a show that would normally be booked at Sokol Underground or TWR is headed for The Saddle Creek Bar on Saturday night — David Bazan of Pedro the Lion is playing with Will Johnson of Centro-matic. I’m not sure why Centro-matic has never played in Omaha before — they’re one of my favorite alt-country/indie rock bands. Johnson will be bringing a different, more introspective sound to The SCB than what Centro-matic fans are used to. Regardless, his amazing voice will still be center stage. Bazan is one of the most important indie singer-songwriters of this decade, with an intense Christian message that is never preachy (and believe me, if I thought it was preachy, this devout non-Christian would tell you). In fact, a lot of Pedro the Lion fans don’t even realize that his music is non-secular in nature. This show has gotten almost no publicity, which is a crying shame. $10, 9 p.m.

Trumping Bazan and Johnson at Sokol Underground is hip-hop artist Brother Ali, who has emerged as one of the more popular MCs of the underground hip-hop movement. Performing with him is Psalm One, BK One and Trama. $10, 9 p.m. Meanwhile at The Waiting Room it’s Sarah Benck and the Robbers, with Zack Hexum and Matt Whipkey. $7, 9 p.m. Last but not least, over at O’Leaver’s it’s Tomato a Day with Whatever Happened to the Dinosaurs; $5, 9:30 p.m.

Finally Sunday, Matador artist Jennifer O’Connor takes The Waiting Room stage with Little Brazil and The Holy Ghost Revival. $8, 9 p.m.

One last bit of news — The Omaha World-Herald announced what most people who have been following The Slowdown project (or who read Eomaha.com’s message boards) have known for weeks — Urban Outfitters is going to be the anchor retailer at a complex that already boasts the Film Streams theaters, The Slowdown Music Hall and bar, The Blue Line coffee and booze shop/bar, and — though it’s not been confirmed — Yia Yia’s Pizza (the anonymous restaurant referenced in the OWH article). Urban Outfitters specializes in a lifestyle clothing line that epitomizes the indie music scene — slacker chic. We’re talking pre-washed, faded T-shirts and jeans, Castro hats, all kinds of hip stuff that has the appearance of having been found in a thrift shop. The popularity of their T-shirt line alone has resulted in Target and Old Navy ripping off the style, especially in the faux pre-worn T-shirt market (though they don’t seem to “get it.”). See for yourself at their online catalog. Saddle Creek gurus Robb Nansel and Jason Kulbel had been trying to get Urban Outfitters involved in the project for over a year, and finally succeeded over a month ago, but have kept the news (mostly) under their hats. The retailer could be the final piece in the puzzle that makes The Slowdown project complete.

I assume that the folks at Village Point and other shopping centers will be bummed, but they never had a shot at Urban Outfitters anyway. Anyone who’s ever been to one of their stores knows that they only go into old-school well-established urban areas with a lot of history, like downtown Chicago, downtown Lawrence, NYC, etc. That’s the reason why Nansel and Kubel had to struggle so hard to convince them to buy into Slowdown. There was no way that Urban Outfitters was ever going to open a shop at Village Pointe or any of the new “shopping villages” popping up in the suburbs. Those places will now cast their gaze toward acquiring an American Apparel storefront. American Apparel is arguably more popular these days than Urban Outfitters with the indie music crowd, thanks to their policy of selling clothing that is three or four sizes smaller than what’s printed on their labels. A men’s XL T-shirt, for example, is equivalent in size to a typical Youth Medium. Bright Eyes T-shirts that are being sold on tour are American Apparel garments. That said, American Apparel’s market is lazer-targeted to 16-21 year olds — they’re sort of the Hot Topic of the indie crowd. Anyone over 25 would look odd wearing one of their shirts or any of their club-wear items (gold lame pants, anyone?).

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Coyote Bones is playing tonight at The Waiting Room with Eagle*Seagull and Nik Fackler’s The Family Radio. Coyote Bones’ new CD, Gentleman on the Rocks, is the first release on the Omaha-based collective Coco Art, whose roster includes Flowers Forever (featuring frontman Derek Presnall of Tilly and the Wall), and legendary bassist/singer-songwriter Dereck Higgins. Gentleman includes guest appearances by Maria Taylor, Neely Jenkins, Nick White, Andy Lemaster, Orenda Fink, Matt Baum, Dan McCarthy, Presnall and Higgins among others, with recording credits that include Joel Petersen’s basement.

The all-star support team is bound to get plenty of attention. Yesterday Pitchfork — the arbiter of all things indie — posted a story about the record and its cast of contributors (here), which is bound to up the audience size at Coyote Bones tour stops. The bottom line: Thom Yorke, Beck and Michael Stipe can bang a tambourine on your new CD but it won’t mean a pile of doo-doo unless the songs are there. And Gentleman delivers. It’s hands down the best locally produced non-Creek CD that I’ve heard so far this year, based purely on the song writing. Check it out tonight at TWR for just $7 or wait until their CD release show at Sokol May 5.

Cassadaga update: Cassadaga has moved up to No. 4 on the iTunes charts. Hits Dailydouble reported yesterday that Cassadaga “is the week’s most impressive debut, with early numbers indicating it could hit the 50-60k mark, powered by big fan-site sales and a solid iTunes number.”

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That enormous thud that you heard reverberating around the world is Cassadaga dropping today. I heard Oberst on NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, talking about how much he loved that Florida town, how magical it is. Meanwhile, The OWH ran another story about the album artwork, again featuring supertalented artist Zack Nipper (read it here). I wonder if Creek has come up with a stock answer when people e-mail saying that they’ve lost their “decoder thingee” and want a new one. Will they be selling extra decoders in the online store?

I noticed writing my column before work this morning (it’s online tomorrow) that Simon Joyner has joined Team Love Records, at least as far as his digital assets are concerned. You can now download early Joyner records from iTunes, including Room Temperature, The Lousy Dance and Songs for the New Year, thanks to Team Love. Missing, my all-time favorite Joyner album, The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll. Why?! Anyway, read about the Simon/Team Love connection here.

Tonight at The Waiting Room, it’s the fun-loving dirges of Man, Man with Icy Demons and Omaha’s own Black Squirrels. $10, 9 p.m..

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This weather is killing me. Look, we’ve come to expect warm temperatures in April. After all, didn’t Prince sing “Sometimes it Snows in April,” to point out the rarity of the meteorological event? It’s too frickin’ cold, people, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better.

With that in mind, I did go out and see one band this Easter weekend. Every year after St. Patrick’s Day I complain about the band that plays down at The Dubliner, swearing that I’ll never sit through their country-fied God-Bless-America set again. When I tell people this, they always respond with: “You really should check out The Elders. They’re an Irish band out of Kansas City and they’re INCREDIBLE.” Well, last Friday The Elders played at The Dubliner, and I figured, why not? It’ll be something different from the usual indie/punk rock stuff that I get on weekends.

So we made our way down to The Dubliner at 9 p.m., paid $10 each and squeezed ourselves into the packed stage room. The Elders apparently have garnered a strong rep for themselves among middle-aged women and country music fans. The reason would be obvious after the first song.

While the six-piece outfit does sport a fiddle player as well as a middle-aged frontman with an Irish brogue, that’s about it for tradition. The rest of the band consists of an electric guitar, bass, keyboards and set of rock drums. The result: the kind of Irish music you might expect to hear at a Michael Flatley clogging show on the Vegas strip, or Irish by way of Mannheim Steamroller. The Elders play a variant that resembles Irish-country more than traditional Irish music. You can thank a backbeat rhythm section that made every song sound like a bland, modern-day FM country rock tune. That said, they’re uber-talented, and the crowd ate it up. It was weird seeing a guy in his late 40s sing along to every one of their originals while about 30 middle-aged women shouldered themselves in front of the stage Engelbert Humperdinck style. A major label would be wise to sign these guys post-haste and get them on the road with The Dixie Chicks. They could be huge.

We, however, didn’t make it past the sixth song. So far, the best Irish music I’ve heard in Omaha has been performed by The Turfmen, who, incidentally, are scheduled to play at The Dubliner this weekend.

Moving on…

The early reviews of Cassadaga are floating onto the Interweb, and the comments are quite a mixed bag.

The king of music critics and my personal writing mentor, Robert Christgau, wrote the Rolling Stone review that just went online here. “Oberst’s prog and jam-band tendencies are both subsumed by a sensibility that’s Americana in a winning, all-embracing sense. Americanapolitan, let’s call it,” says Christgau in his 4-out-of-5 star review, where calls “Classic Cars” “as fine a reflection on the love of an older woman as Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’…” and concludes with “In Cassadaga, Oberst hoped to commune with the dead. On Cassadaga, he shows he can still tell us something by communing with himself.” Nice.

Not so nice was the Pitchfork review (right here). “‘Four Winds,’ with its squealing guitars and fiddles, sounds like a honky-tonk version of ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,’ and the otherwise affecting ‘If the Brakeman Turns My Way’ is held back by its overwrought roots-rock chorus,” says writer Brian Howe, who concludes with “If he would address the political through this personal lens, exploring his own complicity in the military-industrial complex he currently lambastes from a false outside perspective, he might arrive at commentary that’s more about insight and confrontation than moral flattery.” Which is a fancy way of saying he didn’t like it, giving it a 6.0 out of 10.

Newsday‘s Glenn Gamboa might have the most insightful comments thus far (right here). “…the focus on Oberst’s lyrics is so overwhelming that the musical arrangements bend to accommodate them,” he says in the review. “His phrasing and vocal approach is basically the same from start to finish, covering the same short path over and over again, like he’s pacing instead of creating something new.” He concludes his “B-” review with “In short bursts, Cassadaga can be moving, even brilliant at times. But, taken as a whole, it is repetitive, grating and paints Bright Eyes as more of a one-trick pony than he really is.”

There are a couple other notables.

In a rather wandering review (here), All Music gave Cassadaga 4 stars, calling it “the band’s fullest and most developed record to date.”

While the most gushing comments (so far) come from The Independent out of the UK (here). “With Cassadaga, the prodigiously talented Conor Oberst confirms what many have thought for several years now, that he is the most gifted and intelligent lyricist under 30 working in America – and possibly anywhere – today,” says writer Andy Gill. His verdict: 5 stars.

There are about a dozen reviews online, and the consensus is 3.5 to 4 stars, about what Wide Awake rated when it came out. I think you’ll continue to see higher ratings in the more commercially targeted press vs. the indie critics who look at Bright Eyes with a slightly suspicious eye, and who have been listening to Oberst and Co. since the old days. They’ve heard these songs before — only a less tuneful, more confessional version, a version that probably marked a distant time in their lives that they remember with fondness. I’ve never been one of those critics. I struggled through Oberst’s early self-referential recordings and prefer the new stuff from Wide Awake on.

Anyway… Cassadaga drops tomorrow. What will it bring in its first week of sales is anyone’s guess…

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Those looking for the Bright Eyes article, it’s here. For everyone else (around Omaha, anyway)…

Looks like a decent weekend of shows. Too bad the weather is so shitty and cold. Tonight at O’Leaver’s it’s the noisy, quirky rock of Polyvinyl artist 31 Knots with Kill Rock Stars’ act Two Ton Boa and Omaha’s own Kite Pilot. Should be a nice night of big-beat post-punk. $5, 9:30 p.m. Meanwhile, over at The Waiting Room, it’s Matt Whipkey and Anonymous American’s first time on TWR’s stage, with Vinnie Bronx and 10 O’Clock Scholars. $7, 9 p.m.

Saturday night is dominated by Maria Taylor down at Sokol Underground with McCarthy Trenching, Eerie Choir, & Apollo Sunshine, all for $8. Warning: Scenester Alert! Meanwhile, over at The Saddle Creek Bar it’s Kyle Harvey with Reagan Roeder’s new band Reagan and the Rayguns, The Doochies and Chalee. $5, 9 p.m. and over at The Waiting Room it’s Scott Severin with Soul Plexus and Thunder Power featuring Lazy-i intern Brendan Greene-Walsh! $7, 9 p.m.

Happy spring-centric holidays to everyone.

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Just posted, a profile/interview with Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst. In this nearly 5,000-word story (yeah, it’s really that long) Conor talks about the place Cassadaga, the record Cassadaga, the meaning behind a handful of its songs and how they tie to his life (from panic attacks to colon cleansing), politics (including the politics of talk shows), Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott and orchestras, Rolling Stone and (possible) gold records, and being comfortable right here in Omaha. Read it here.

As amazingly long and drawn-out as this story is, there’s still thousands of words that didn’t make the cut, which I’ll be compiling as an addendum (or a Pt. 2) for next week’s column (look for it here next Wednesday). Thanks go out to Robb Nansel and Jason Kulbel at Saddle Creek Records for helping arrange the interview, and of course to Oberst for doing it. In all honesty, I didn’t think I’d get a shot at talking to him this time, especially after his publicist declined the initial interview request, saying that Conor was only taking international press this time. There are advantages, it seems, to being from Omaha as well as having written about him for a decade. In all honesty, he ain’t that much different from the 18-year-old college guy I talked to back in ’98. The stage is bigger, his sound is bigger, his life is bigger, but he’s basically the same.

Tonight at The Waiting Room, coming straight to you from a garage in Tel Aviv, it’s Monotonix with Lincoln’s Rent Money Big and Omaha’s The Lepers. Monotonix is a trio of Israeli dirt-heads who grew up with Sabbath and Deep Purple and who have a reputation for doing the unexpected on and off stage. It should make for some colorful hi-jinx. $7, 9 p.m.

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With a name like Elvis Perkins, I figured this guy for a twangy rock-a-billy dude when in fact he’s more of a Neil Young/Dylan folk rocker complete with acoustic guitar, harmonica, subtle organ, and spare back-beat drums. Further research reveals that he’s from New York and that his CDs come out on UK label XL Recordings. He plays tonight at The Waiting Room with Let’s Go Sailing, a band that crows that it’s had two songs played on the March 22 episode of Grey’s Anatomy, including one during the end sequence! That’s sales gold, just ask The Frey. Their music is breathy female vocals (a la Azure Ray) sung over kicky, laid-back, cello-powered indie rock, perfect for that very special episode of, well, Grey’s Anatomy, a show that I’ve never seen before because I have this aversion toward any cop/lawyer/doctor dramedy inhabited by fashion models who wind up sleeping with each other by the end of the first season. $8, 9 p.m. That’s it for today. No column this week, as all that space was eaten up by the Bright Eyes feature, which goes online here tomorrow.

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You spent the weekend going to hot shows and drinking lots of booze and enjoying hip indie rock bands. I spent the weekend writing a cover story for The Reader about Bright Eyes, which will go online Thursday (but the out-takes could go online tomorrow). Cassadaga will be huge, whether Conor thinks so or not.

And speaking of Bright Eyes, here’s the first article that I’ve seen that references Bright Eyes as a “Polydor Records band,” which seemed somewhat strange. The story’s about the CD’s cover art, which is super-cool. It’s a stereogram design, which means Zac Nipper’s illustrations are only viewable with a cool decoder device that comes with the disc — yet another reason to buy the hard copy rather than download it from iTunes. Thankfully, they didn’t use the same technology for the lyrics book. I smell Grammy… for the design.

Zac isn’t the only graphic artist at Saddle Creek feeling the love. Wired online just published a Q&A with Creek designer Jadon Ulrich about album art and digital vinyl (the story’s here). So just how important is album artwork when it comes time to make a buying decision, Jadon? “Ten years ago, I might have bought a record I never heard of based on the look of the cover and packaging, I don’t think I’d ever do that now.” Jadon obviously never saw the cover of Cactus Nerve Thang’s debut.

Intern Brendan Greene-Walsh went to The Good Life show at The Waiting Room last night. His comments about opener Berg Sans Nipple: “They played an interesting set revolving around samples, keys and drums. The beat was strong throughout and offered some needed continuity to it all. The highlight of their set was a toss-up between the steel drum and mbira. Very reminiscent of Kid A/Ok Computer-era Radiohead. My only qualm was with not being able to differentiate between songs and the lack of any real vocals. None-the-less, I can see why Team Love picked this duo up.” The only thing Brendan said in his write-up about The Good Life set was that they played some new songs — but he forgot to tell us if they were any good. I was planning on going to this show, but fell asleep during the second half of the Florida/Ohio St. game (I finished second in the office pool, btw).

Tonight, one of the most talked-about shows so far this year — Neko Case at Lincoln’s Rococo Theater with Jon Rauhouse. Surprisingly, tickets are still available for $18. Show starts at 8 p.m.

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