Bright Eyes create new phase of pop
Rolling Stone magazine recently called Conor Oberst America’s greatest new songwriter, and I cannot disagree with them. The 24-year-old prodigy and his band, Bright Eyes, won independent album of the year in 2002 with “Lifted: the Story Is in the Soil, Put Your Ear to the Ground.” Anyone who fell in love with that album knew it had to be Oberst’s masterpiece.
We were all wrong.
Bright Eyes has now released two new albums simultaneously: “Digital Ash,” a more electronically experimental endeavor, and “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning,” a stripped-down follow-up to “Lifted,” complete with the jaw-dropping acoustic poetry Oberst knows best; “Awake” is the album worthy of review.
Despite his recent success, Oberst remains faithful to Saddle Creek Records, the label he helped create at age 13. The Omaha native does not seek radio airplay; in fact, he absolutely refuses its proposals with disgust. That doesn’t matter; there are plenty of cult followers who would gladly shine his shoes. It is not a place at the pop music table he strives for, but high art.
Oberst is the rock n’ roll historian of our times, reminiscent of Bob Dylan’s emergence in the early Sixties with “Freewheelin,’” an artist sifting through the ashes of a world he is trying desperately to make sense of. His voice is one of beautiful angst, desperation and the wisdom of a man who has lived far beyond his years, one that reminds us that we are flat-lining.
Do not let his stage name fool you-he is not another pretty face, and this is not background music. When Oberst sings, you cannot help but shut-up and listen. Oberst sings with delicate melody while his acoustic guitar gently weeps.
On a couple of tracks, this leads to climactic shouts many would dismiss as drunken rants, but drunken rants have never sounded this prolific.” “Lua,” the album’s darling, tells a story of love and binge drug use: “We may die from medication, but it sure killed all the pain/ what was normal in the evening, by morning, seems insane.”
Oberst seamlessly blends lost love and politics as if they were all part of the same fruitless emotion. This is expressed most potently in the song “Landlocked Blues,” in which Oberst sermonizes, “We made love in the living room floor, with the noise in the background from a televised war.”
We are in a new phase of popular music, one where the detached cappuccino sippers of the 90s have no place. Now, there is no choice but to care about what is going on. This is not complaint rock. It is cynicism mixed with a strange hope, the summation of the young American experience in 2005. We are wide awake, and it’s morning. Welcome to the new, endearing run of things.
Posted by Colonnade Archives
on Apr 8 2005. Filed under Other.
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