If Conor Oberst shed anything by releasing his new
album under his given name, it was the sense of momentousness that makes Bright
Eyes albums more than something for listeners to put on, play, and ponder only
when they feel like it. That's not a knock against the seriousness of Bright
Eyes as an enterprise, or Conor Oberst as an outgrowth, though there is something
to be savored in the kind of looseness engendered here.
For this record—notable also for coming out
on Merge, as opposed to his stalwart Omaha label, Saddle Creek—Oberst
decamped to Mexico with a group of players he took to calling The Mystic Valley
Band. The songs they came up with still live and die on Oberst's lyrics, which
reach imagistic heights as high as any on Bright Eyes records (Fevers And Mirrors still being the best),
and sometimes even higher. The album opener finds Oberst injecting a rich sense
of place ("Watch the migrants smoke in the old orange grove and the red rocket
blaze over Cape Canaveral") with the kind of emotional shots that make places
ripe for sensing ("I watched your face age backward changing shape in my
memory"). Many of the songs after follow similar travelogue cues, with a
wandering range of sounds and styles to suit. "Sausalito" and "I Don't Want To
Die (In The Hospital)" rock more freely than anything in the Bright Eyes
songbook, and—like much else on an album that counts as more than just a
casual anomaly—Oberst himself sounds enlivened by the chance to listen in
and sing while he's at it.