Conor Oberst: Ruminations review – bracingly direct

Recorded in snow-bound Nebraska last winter, Conor Oberst’s latest solo album finds him rowing back from the lush 70s west coast sounds of 2014’s Upside Down Mountain for an altogether more self-contained affair, on which the sometime Bright Eyes frontman plays all the piano, harmonica and guitar parts himself. The rediscovered intimacy suits him – there’s a bracing directness to these songs that’s been lacking over the last decade. Lyrically, however, bleakness is never far below the surface, and death and illness are near constants. Indeed, “Cathetered piss fed through a tube/ Cyst in the brain, blood on the bamboo” is one of the cheerier couplets on Counting Sheep.