Simon Joyner - Ghosts (2012)

Ghosts marks the 20th year of Simon Joyner's recording career; in some respects, he's come quite a distance in that time, and in other ways, his core ideals remain relatively unchanged. On the most obvious level, he's gone from an agitated young upstart to a venerated elder statesman of the Omaha music scene that finally started getting national attention through the efforts of Joyner disciples like Conor Oberst and company. As an artist, Joyner has evolved from a brash, almost punky provocateur to a sophisticated songsmith whose poetic ballads offer endless, subtle shades of meaning. But between 1992, when he started turning out self-released cassettes, to 2012 and the ambitious double-vinyl (yes, vinyl) Ghosts, Joyner has remained an advocate of making records as emotionally and artistically close to the bone as possible, embracing lo-fi production more as a way of life than a technological bias.

Throughout his career, Joyner has (quite rightly) earned such sobriquets as "the alt-folk Leonard Cohen" or "the indie rock Townes Van Zandt." Not only does he deserve such descriptions, he seems to embrace them -- Ghosts' "Answering Machine Blues," for instance, is an overt ode to Van Zandt's "Fare Thee Well, Miss Carousel." But if it takes excerpting great lines to make the case for Joyner's status among that company, we can play that game too. Just for starters, there's "A good man is hard to find but a bad one's even harder to get rid of" ("Vertigo"), or "You make broken mirrors pirouette just to multiply your silhouette" ("Last Will and Testament"), and "When the worst doesn't happen, that's called good luck" ("When the Worst Doesn't Happen"). Over the course of Ghosts' double-album length (with most songs clocking in over the five-minute mark) there's ample opportunity to absorb Joyner's lyrical acuity. And the way the record seesaws with a giddy sonic schizophrenia from acoustic-based, folk-inflected arrangements to edgy, post-punk-influenced outbursts and back, it's impossible to become too complacent, which is just as it should be.