Oberst's talent shines in new Bright Eyes

Josh Wild
staff writer

I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning.

I was originally going to review both of the new albums from Bright Eyes (read: Conor Oberst), the electronic experimentation of Digital Ash in a Digital Urn and the country-fried I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, but then I realized that I really haven’t listened to Digital Ash all that much. Don’t get me wrong: “Take It Easy (Love Nothing)” is probably my favorite track from both albums; but I’m Wide Awake is just the word “orgiastic” comes to mind.

Simultaneously released with her sister album on January 25, I’m Wide Awake is the work of a maturing, focused artist. After rising to marginalized fame as the king of the Omaha Indie Scene, Oberst recently relocated to New York’s lower east side. His new songs ring with a tension between the veiled optimism of a fresh-faced new New Yorker ready to take on the world and all the Bushes that (de)populate it and the wistful nostalgia of a 20-something suddenly disconnected from the Midwestern roots from which he drew so much inspiration.

His lyrics have never been better. He still drops monster similes (“You held your camera like a bible, just wishing so bad it held some kind of truth”), but, as he gets personal, these devices fall away and are replaced with a world where emotions blur the line between the real and the metaphorical. This is where his best songs live.

A good example is “First Day of My Life,” a song that is dangerously close to being perfect. Oberst’s fragile, perpetually boyish voice tells some “you” that “this is the first day of my life. / I swear I was born right in the doorway.” Simple lyrics like these reach for an honesty that exists beyond the literal, and that’s why they’re devastating.

The other two largely stripped-down songs, “Lua” and “Landlocked Blues,” are among the best tracks on the album. The first one, with just Conor on an acoustic, recounts a drugged-out night with a tragic lover. The song is bare as midnight and there is a hollowness to Oberst’s voice that seems almost to overwhelm him.

“Landlocked Blues” is possibly the best song on I’m Wide Awake and probably features the best Bright Eyes lyrics to date. It slowly builds from meandering variations on the refrain “If you walk away, I’ll walk away,” adding the soft harmonies of guest Emmylou Harris, before exploding into an all-out incrimination of the architects of the Iraq war, waving a painfully ironic trumpeting of “Taps” at them like a giant red, white and blue middle finger.

The scary thing is that even though these three songs are really, really great, they are not markedly better than everything else on the album. There’s not a bad song here. There’s not even a mediocre song here. The closest thing to a flaw is the kitschily-titled closer “Road to Joy,” which goes so far as to borrow Beethoven’s melody. But even that song, which lets loose in a Bush-induced rage like any good Bright Eyes finish should, would be a standout track on any other album released this year.

Suffice it to say that I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning is the best album I have heard in a long time. Oberst has proven himself to be an artist of staggering talent, a songwriter who could justifiably be labeled the “Voice” of something, if not his generation, at least the more depressed, artsy part of it.

Each time a new Bright Eyes album comes out, I always feel like Oberst has reached a limit, that he could not possibly go beyond that point. And I’m always wrong. And this time he did it while writing and recording a whole other album completely different from this one. That’s just not right.

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