Word: oberst
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...choice with Oberst is fairly simple: laugh at him or cry with him. Laughter is certainly the path of least resistance, especially when confronted with the two hulking new Bright Eyes albums--I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn--released simultaneously on Jan. 25. Over the course of 22 tracks, there is exactly one attempt at relative lightness--"I always get lost when I leave the Village/ So I couldn't come meet you in Brooklyn last night" (well, I chuckled)--and Oberst whispers it lest anyone notice. His emotional palette...
...stronger of the new records is Wide Awake, which is mostly acoustic songs sung in Oberst's quivering man-child breaths. On his previous albums, Oberst reached impatiently for any instrument lying around the studio (one track opened with him asking, "Can I get a goddamn timpani roll?"). Here he picks his sounds carefully to offset the intensity of his voice and material. On the rousing opener, At the Bottom of Everything, a mandolin clips jauntily away while he crows, "We must blend into the choir, sing as static with the whole/ We must memorize nine numbers and deny...
This kind of balance makes the moments when Oberst gets truly miserable much more compelling. Landlocked Blues starts out chronicling a bad relationship and over the course of six riveting minutes meanders into an antiwar ballad. It is easily the best song written against the war in Iraq, as well as one of the better ones about a decomposing affair. Oberst tops himself with Lua, in which he sings about a lost girl in ways that are not particularly dramatic, just perfectly descriptive...
...Oberst doesn't lend himself well to sound bites, however. Both of the aforementioned songs are nearly 500 words long, and like Dylan tunes, they sprawl and ramble and seem to rhyme (but don't) in lots of strange places. Their effects build over time, which makes quoting individual lyrics from them a little beside the point--though if forced, I would choose these lines from Landlocked Blues: "The future hangs over our heads, and it moves with each current event/ Until it falls all around like a cold steady rain, just stay in when it's looking this...
...Wide Awake is an example of the circumstances in which Oberst can be great, Digital Ash proves how fleeting those circumstances are. The lyrics on Digital Ash remain models of thoughtful despair, but the acoustic warmth is replaced by a series of unremarkable synthetic burps and tinny keyboard riffs. One track sounds dangerously similar to Nena's 99 Luftballons. Digital Ash rocks harder but feels emptier...