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Zero 7
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed albums.
Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 20 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 55 votes
Read user comments
Rate this album >
Album Info
Label: Saddle Creek
Release Date: 13 August 2002
Discs: 1 disc
Genre(s): Indie, Rock
Summary
Prolific 22-year-old Nebraska singer-songwriter Connor Oberst returns to his Bright Eyes guise for this 13-track effort, following a stint fronting the band Desaparecidos.
Also By This Artist: Cassadaga Digital Ash In A Digital Urn I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning Motion Sickness [Live] Noise Floor (Rarities 1998-2005)
Also On The Web: Saddle Creek Records
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Nude As The News
A maddeningly ambitious album, Lifted fits into the pantheon of the great concept records of the past few years, joining the likes of The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin, and Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea.
Read Full Review >All Music Guide
Bright Eyes has mixed badness with beauty for a sonic storybook that relates to everyone.
Read Full Review >Billboard
Oberst's fourth full-length is a bleak, bipolar journey through his emotionally charged mind, with melodramatic midnight ballads, dusty piano, and the occasional sexy violin.
Read Full Review >Ink Blot Magazine
[Oberst] infuses his figurative laments with a melancholy earnestness, communicating a more gut-wrenching breed of angst than the Limp Bizkits and Eminems of the world could ever hope to.
Read Full Review >Village Voice
It is frankly sentimental music, lost in memory, full of mistakes. Give it a chance and it will take you backward to a time when you believed in something that you don't believe in anymore.
Read Full Review >Blender
The Ritalin generation may have found its Bob Dylan. [#9, p.143]
Q Magazine
An exhausting, emotionally wracked affair. [Sep 2002, p.101]
Drawer B
This album is an extraordinary display of Oberst’s songwriting prowess. It’s obscenely ambitious and pretentious and ridiculous but unquestionably memorable and affecting.
Read Full Review >Spin
By turning indie-folk into nonstop neurotic cabaret, Oberst may have made the best album of his prodigious, prolific career. [Sep 2002, p.133]
Mojo
Miraculously, it succeeds as a rambunctious, unruly grenade of largely unmitigated spleen, a hail of words set to music. [Sep 2002, p.96]
Pitchfork
Love it or hate it, the precious, nasal vibrato Oberst affects is the tie that binds all these varied tunes together in the end, and in most cases, it compliments the music admirably.
Read Full Review >Stylus Magazine
No longer does he sound on the verge of breakdown with every aching syllable, no more pent-up jadedness---this is pure, cheerful post-orgasmic clarity.
Read Full Review >Almost Cool
While it's sometimes a rambling mess, The Story Is In The Soil... sounds like one of those releases that was both cathartic and damn fun to put together.
Read Full Review >Magnet
While the song remains beautifully, remarkably, the same, it's getting harder to like. [#55, p.72]
The Onion (A.V. Club)
At times, as with his past work, Lifted offers more to admire than love, as Oberst's tendency toward overreaching and didacticism periodically distracts from the nakedly beautiful emotion at the album's core.
Read Full Review >New Musical Express
Untrustworthy, confused, touching and idiotically ambitious; hard work that, undoubtedly, repays the effort.
Read Full Review >Uncut
Spewing more words per inch than an IRS vault, the effect is like primal scream therapy set to incidental music. [Oct 2002, p.101]
Austin Chronicle
Each new song is an homage to one influence or another, but the clues are so subtle, they tickle the brain in a way that causes a vague, slightly pleasant itch that's impossible to scratch.
Read Full Review >Neumu.net
It is, in such, truly great, or truly arrogant, or truly conceited, or truly preposterous, or truly confused, or truly bemused, or truly profound, or truly magnificent. Or maybe all of these things. At once. Or at times.
Read Full Review >Splendid
There are times on this record, though, when the quaver fades for a few notes and [Oberst's] voice drops out of hysterical high range, and it's actually pleasant to listen to -- but that never lasts, and that's a shame.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this album is 9.1 (out of 10) based on 55 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
dan M gave it a9:
Amazing album..every song is absolutly perfect in it's own way...Although Fevers & Mirrors is far better, I do love this album...best songs are "Big Picture", "False Advertising", "Wast Of Paint", and "Bowl Of Oranges"
Andy gave it an8:
The CD that made Conner a celebrity, and rightfully so.
Bobby JJ gave it a1:
i cant believe people like this album, i dont
Morgan M gave it a10:
frickin' awesome...
R Ford gave it a10:
Conor Oberst is the man i havent heard a bad song yet by him
kenny m gave it a10:
this is an amazing, epic album, and in my opinion the best bright eyes album with "i'm wide awake, its morning" right behind. no one who apreciates good lyrics should pass it up.
voodoocookie gave it a10:
This is Conor Oberst's best album ever. I would recommend this album as the first album a newbie to Bright Eyes should listen to. Fever and Mirrors comes close but there is something special about this album!
