Insignificance
- Jim O'Rourke
- Band Name: Jim O'Rourke
- Record Label: Drag City
- Release Date: Nov 20, 2001
- Critic Score
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90This is adventurous modern music which uses old rock and singer-songwriter traditions as the raw material to be manipulated. [Album Of The Month, Feb 2002, p.110]
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90'Insignificance' is an album fraught with contradictions: tightly funky guitars sit alongside angelic piano and crunching 70s rock riffs shoulder belligerently up to honeyed pop harmonies. These are fascinating contradictions glued together with a binding harmonic honesty.
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83Insignificance is the release that finds him hitting his stride completely, seemingly mixing little bits of all the different styles that he's poked around with and boiling it all down into a cohesive little release.
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'Insignificance' lays down an awesome challenge to other guitar records - it contains more great ideas than most bands have in their entire career. It's the first unequivocal classic album of the new year.
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Insignificance’s length of less than 40 minutes perhaps indicates that O’Rourke is not as serious about producing a pop opus as he is interested in getting a kick out of screwing around with pop song writing.
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80A shockingly insightful and resonant look at the workings of a musician generally more given to hiding behind absurdly twisted turns of musical phrase than letting us in on the inner-workings of his mind.
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80O'Rourke revisits the lush orchestration and dreamy atmospherics he pioneered in Gastr Del Sol, but hanging out with Thurston Moore also appears to have had an effect. [Dec 2001, p.128]
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80The jaunty-yet-subtle tunes sneak up on you slowly, so you don't notice O'Rourke's corrosively misanthropic lyrics until they're inextricably lodged in your head. [#53, p.86]
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80The only gripe is that at 38 minutes, Insignificance is too short. [Feb 2002, p.92]
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80The fly in the ointment is the lyric content, which plumbs depths of misanthropy that make labelmate Bill Callahan (Smog) sound like Bobby McFerrin.
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80Rarely has the indulgence of rock ‘n roll dreams sounded this concise.
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70Overall, the melodies are so tight they seem vacuum-packed, and the album delivers a platter of faultless rock songs.
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70Proof that simple pleasures always beat academic detachment. [March 2002, p.137]
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Insignificance's ingeniously subtle songwriting project is one of O'Rourke's most affecting yet.
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70A pleasurable collection of comfortably played, understated, slightly skewed songs with smart lyrics. [#214, p.52]
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30His least demanding work ever, steeped in the traditions of pop and rock.
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JamesD.10
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JimM.9