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| REVIEWS |
Bright
Eyes
I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning
(Saddle
Creek)
Here is a theory: For some people, the only success is failure.
Conor Oberst is surely one of these people. Nearly all of the
best songs by Bright Eyes, the Oberst fronted collaborative
project, deal with failure, specifically the failure of relationships,
failure of our government, and, most notably, the failure of
his own art. The band’s Lifted, or The Story is in
the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, was their swansong,
with perhaps more angst and stripped down emotion than any of
their previous releases. The album dealt with pain of all kinds
such as the pain of creating art (Oberst’s realization
that “everything I have made is trite and cheap and a
waste of paint, of tape, of time” in “Waste of Paint”),
the pain of love (“love is an excuse to get hurt”
in “Lover I Don’t Have to Love”), not to mention
the pain of religion and politics. The only departure from the
spiral of misery on Lifted… was in the positively
upbeat “Bowl of Oranges.” This track was so intriguing
because it was so oddly upbeat and instrumentally simply; Oberst
sung of helping the sick and the paralyzing beauty of the world,
and left many a listener wondering what provoked this foreign
sentiment. Was it sarcasm? Was it a harbinger of things to come?
While the track provoked discussion, it also became an extremely
successful college radio single and got the band invited to
perform on Conan O’Brien. This was not the failure and
obscurity Conor was used to, and, after basing nearly his entire
career around failure, fans wondered what direction Bright Eyes
would continue in.
At the beginning of this month, the world received an answer
in two separate discs, released simultaneously; the techno-rock
Digital Ash in a Digital Urn and the disc reviewed
here, I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning. From
the title of the disc alone, one could tell that things were
slightly sunnier in the Bright Eyes camp, and, lest to say,
this is not the album anyone expected Conor Oberst to produce.
The defining characteristics of any two given Bright Eyes songs
prior to I’m Wide Awake… was that they
were bound to be self-indulgent, but also most likely sound
nothing like each other. The songs on Lifted, for example,
moved from gothic orchestral rock to acoustic soul bearing to
country with ease. I’m Wide Awake, on the other
hand, is almost entirely a country album.
“At The Bottom of Everything” starts the album on
a more traditional Bright Eyes note, with Oberst spending nearly
two minutes telling the story of two people on a doomed plane
crashing into the ocean, each trying to understand the proximity
of their own demise. The song itself then begins and listeners
get an acoustic, fiddle enhanced bitter, vitriolic lament that
ends with Oberst finding happiness because “I found out
I am really no one.” This realization by Oberst is a telling
summary of the entire album. Oberst was one of a select few
songwriters whose work was enhanced by the self-indulgent nature
of his songs, and he boldly declares in this first track that
he is nothing special, just an average guy. For the majority
of the album, the listener is treated to poetic, sparse, downbeat
country tracks, many of which feature beautiful backing vocals
from Emmy Lou Harris, an amazing country artist in her own right.
These songs are beautiful, poignant, and lyrically astute. Oberst
even manages to tackle the political without sounding preachy
in the slow waltz, “Landlocked Blues.” However,
something just doesn’t feel right.
This brings up the paradox of the review, should this review
recommend this album as an excellent and adventurous country
album, or call this a creative retreat for Oberst and the least
exciting release in the Bright Eyes catalog? Perhaps it is too
much to expect from Oberst to release an album with the emotional
pull of his earlier discs, but the distance by which he separates
himself from the listener on this album is huge. Perhaps the
best thing to be said about this release is that it really is
quite good, and that it’s just unfair to have any expectations
for Oberst to follow a linear path, as long as his releases
are of as high a quality as I’m Wide Awake, It’s
Morning is.
Reviewed by
Gabriel Kalmuss-Katz
February 2nd, 2005 |
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