Posted: by The Alt Editing Staff
Bright Eyes’ classic double release of I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn coincided with my sixteenth birthday. While I wasn’t a fan of the band yet on the release, they were the records that got me into Bright Eyes and remain favorites years later, the songs and memories associated with them ingrained in my consciousness. I’m certainly still a Bright Eyes fan—a quick inventory of my record shelves reveals twenty-one albums featuring Conor Oberst, and when I pick up my acoustic guitar I can go for a few hours just playing tunes penned by Oberst off the top of my head from how obsessively I learned them over the years—but, there’s also some embarrassment in this fact. Whenever I tell someone that Bright Eyes is one of my favorite bands ever, it’s usually not without the addendum “for better or worse.” It’s kind of a dumb to use a word like embarrassment about listening to a musician whose work I’ve enjoyed for nearly twenty years, but anyone who’s tried to show Bright Eyes to a friend or partner and had to get through one of Oberst’s crimes against album openers—or deal with a less-than-favorable reaction to his trademark warble, as it was so often referred to as in old reviews—should understand what I’m talking about.
That being said, any apprehension I have approaching new music from Oberst is usually swept away by the fact that music generally hits. Payola still rips and its vision of America teetering on the edge of fascism has certainly (and unfortunately) held up, the Ruminations/Salutations duo is among his best work, and Down in the Weeds, Where the World Was Once was a solid rebirth of the Bright Eyes project that has arguably gotten better over the past four years. The Companion EPs, on the other hand, were largely a disappointment. My notes for a review I never wrote on the collection of 9 EPs are littered with terms like “cash grab” and “cynical.” They’re largely not worth listening to, although Mike Mogis sounds like he’s enjoying the trip down memory lane and any track with Katie Crutchfield is vastly elevated by her presence.
After the obligatory (and not overly grating) Bright Eyes album opener, side A of Five Dice, All Threes should hit like the first cold beer cracked upon reuniting with an old friend for fans of the band. The opening line of “I was cruel like a president / It was wrong but I ordered it” is a bit too lacking in metaphor, but references to SoHo girls, Bay Ridge boys, and betting on the Mets help pick things up. With its vaguely alchemical rhyming of “crucible” and “gold,” train chugging along the track strumming style, and John Prine Common Sense horns, “El Capitan” is one of the stronger moments here. It makes for a nice pair with closer “Tin Soldier Boy,” which finds Bright Eyes in full-on Prine mode and at the most fun sounding on the whole record (you can picture them getting a kick out of the Scorcese line in the studio).
There’s a collection of notes in the “Bas Jan Ader” piano melody that bring to mind Neil Young’s “Til the Morning Comes,” giving the song a nice sway. The lyrical nods to Mark Twain and Tale of Two Cities straddle the line of working and coming across a bit corny, but the “Shamrock on a jacket, dropped into a casket / Baby that’s no way to die” hits as effectively as any lyrical snapshot in Oberst’s discography. In a similar way, “Tiny Suicides” succeeds in spite of itself, staggering along before it reaches that gut-punch of a final line.
With its placement smack in the middle of the record, distinct sound compared to the tunes around it, and the attention-grabbing lyric of the record, there’s a deliberate centerpiece-of-the-album feel to “All Threes.” Unfortunately, it’s kind of a clunker despite the strength of the dual vocals. While there’s no arguing with the sentiment behind the Elon Musk line, the execution (I promise no pun intended) falls flat in its clumsy bluntness. Of course, this type of awkward confessional style has always been a strength of Oberst’s, but it comes with the risk that any swing that misses does so spectacularly.
Conversely, the emancipation proclamation line in “Spun Out” is pretty gross and indefensible when you see it written out, but manages to go down smoothly when you hear it in real time. And perhaps in a song partially about justifying one’s drinking to oneself since once the bottle is open you’re gonna have fun, the smoothness of those bitter lines might be a symbol for the song’s overall meaning (as I think these thoughts and jot down notes on my first listen through the record, the band drops out and the sound of dice is preceded by Oberst saying “shut the fuck up, man” as if anticipating this kind of masturbatory over-analysis. After all, we know he’s not singing for critics.)
Luckily, the record doesn’t linger too long on the quasi-Digital Ash diversion of “All Threes,” and it’s followed with the energetic “Rainbow Overpass.” The shoutalong chorus, the pushing together of images of busted mufflers and vial-strewn streets, and the chug-a-lug strumming all make the tune feel like a spiritual sequel to “Another Travelin’ Song.” Likewise, “Real Feel 105°” is classic Bright Eyes in 6/8 with some lovely mandolin flourishes from Mogis. As a whole, the band sounds great here, rounding out the rhythm section with Macey Taylor and Jason Boesel from Oberst’s Mystic Valley Band years (as well as previous Bright Eyes outings) and Dawes’ Griffin Goldsmith. It might be a cliché to talk about the familiarity of musical collaborators, but that doesn’t make the effect any less strong when you hear it. These musicians have been playing together a long time, and shows both in how good the band sounds and how much fun it sounds like they’re having jamming together.
Unlike the tracks bracketing it, the breezy “Hate” is a bit of a departure for the band, cultivating vibes not dissimilar to Steve Miller’s “The Joker.” The laundry list of shit that Oberst hates starts to get a little tiresome at first, but he saves it with the inward turn of “I hate the way I get through the day, my preoccupations / There’s no receipt, no deceit, no paper trail at all / Every single fleeting thought becomes another outlaw song / One hand on a smoking gun and a bullet in the innocent / Don’t you know the bad guys always win.”
If nothing else, Five Dice, All Threes (along with Down in the Weeds) proves that there’s still gas in the Bright Eyes tank after the unrewarding nostalgia trip of the Companion EPs. More than that, it argues that a new Bright Eyes record is still essential listening, even if some of that listening is spent grappling with the songwriting.
Five Dice, All Threes is out everywhere with vinyl available through Dead Oceans.
Disappointing / Average / Good / Great / Phenomenal
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Aaron Eisenreich | @slobboyreject
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