Omnibus

Editor's Info:
Though this folksy Montana-based collective never transcended its diehard college audience to achieve widespread national acclaim, it left a legacy of gentle, jangly, literate songs featuring accordion, violin, banjo, and the occasional reference to Albert Camus. It also provided the springboard for its front person and main songwriter, Colin Meloy, to form the rather more successful, though no less literate Decemberists. This two-CD set captures Tarkio's essence--smart, nuanced, deeply personal notes from the cusp of adolescence and adulthood.

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Ocena: Rating: 5.7
[...] Tarkio formed in Missoula, Montana, in 1996, after Meloy returned from a few semesters at the University of Oregon with a mind to change his major to English. Once settled, he recruited banjo player Gibson Hartwell, bassist Louis Stein, and drummer Brian Collins, and the band took its name from a nearby ghost town. Over just a few years, Tarkio recorded a few EPs-- most self-released, but one via Barcelona Records-- all of which are collected on Omnibus, along with a few previously unreleased tracks. Predictably, there's a lot of institutional guitar jangle in every song, along with some polite strumming, decent drumming, and Meloy's studious wordplay and lit-class allusions to Camus and The Sheltering Sky.
Then as now, Meloy stands out. His now-familiar vocals and brainy lyrics elevate the group above the mass of uncelebrated college bands past and present, even if he sounds like an impressionable student just out of a stimulating lit class. There are intimations of the scamp he would become with the Decemberists, Omnibus even contains an early, less animated version of "My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist" from the latter band's 5 Songs EP. But this is definitely Meloy in his formative years, before all the sea shanties and chimbley sweeps and military homoeroticism, when he was just getting control of his humor and intelligence. In the liner notes, he dismisses these songs with a half-interested "feh," preferring to think of them as a soundtrack to memories of camaraderie and teeth cutting. [...]