IRT Magazine

BRIGHT EYES

Cassadaga (Saddle Creek)

I’m listening to Cassadaga right now. I’ve had this album for over a month and have never, until this point, gotten past the third track. This might be because there’s not much to Conor Oberst anymore. There’s only so much you can write about and record about before you start sounding really watered down. Maybe I should give the album some more time so I can actually listen to it all the way through. Maybe there’s something I’m missing. Maybe I should give it another chance.

The one thing that Conor Oberst never changes is the meandering first track off of basically every single album that Bright Eyes releases. Cassadaga’s opener Clairaudients (Kill or Be Killed) has the standard self-indulgent recording at the beginning—this time of a woman talking on an answering machine about Cassadaga, and small spiritual town in Florida from where the album gets its namesake—which leads into an equally meandering Oberst and his beloved guitar as he sings over audio clips of psychics about how times have changed and it’s kill or be killed. It’s sentimental but it’s also six minutes of nonsensical orchestral movements and by the end of it I’m skipping the track as I do with every other opening song on almost every other Bright Eyes album in existence.

The song trails off and leads into Four Winds, the first single released off the album. It’s folky and catchy and upbeat in a tongue-in-cheek, cynical way. This song proves that Oberst has made good use of his friends since the days of 1998’s letting off the happiness, back when it was predominantly him and his guitar. Following this, in If the Brakeman Turns My Way, Oberst gets preachy and tells us that we’ve gotta find ourselves a place to level out. Thanks Conor, I’ll get right on that. Cleanse Song is a gem, actually, and my ill feelings towards Bright Eyes suddenly getting more preachy and less talky begin to fade away. Yeah, we do need some laughter, don’t we Conor?

But we were all foolish to think that Oberst had forgotten the political cape he started wearing back around the 2004 elections. No One Would Riot For Less is one part sweet love song and three parts bash of the war in Iraq. I’m always up for a political song, but after 2005’s Digital Ash in a Digital Urn and I’m Wide Awake, it’s Morning, I’m ready to go back to listening to Bright Eyes because Conor Oberst knew how to word my feelings in a way that I didn’t…not because I want to be told that war has no heart. But I Must Belong Somewhere reminds me that there still might be hope that Oberst isn’t making his career into a vendetta against the White House, as he asks us simply to leave us where he is because everything belongs somewhere. That’s the kind of song that makes you feel better about where you are, and that’s the kind of song that we all need to hear at some point. The album closes with Lime Tree, as an organ, a guitar, Conor Oberst, and a chorus of female voices leave us with the explanation that they felt lost and found with every step they took. Cue prompt ending.

Now that I’ve finished my first full rotation of this album, I can reread what I’ve written and understand that I’m probably being too critical. But quite frankly, I miss the old Bright Eyes. I miss the feeling I had the first time I listened to Calendar Hung Itself and realized that yeah, I do worry you smoke too many cigarettes. I even miss the shitty recording quality of the tracks on letting off the happiness and 2000’s Fevers and Mirrors because, regardless of the fact that your track is echoing because of the room you recorded it in, it’s still really awesome that you’re doing the recording on an eight-track in your pal’s basement. Bright Eyes just isn’t like that anymore. I don’t feel the punch that I used to feel when I listen to this album. I don’t feel the angst or the anger or the sadness. It’s almost as if Conor Oberst went to bed one night and he was nineteen, and then woke up the next morning to discover that he was ten years older and ten years more mature. I don’t fucking like that.

However, can we hold this against him? When you’ve been releasing albums for nine years, eventually your sound has to change. There are only so many songs you can write about how angry you are that you survived your last suicide attempt, or about how many hours you spent bent over the toilet this morning because you drank two bottles of JD alone last night. Looking over Bright Eyes’ past three releases, it’s safe to say that this change has occurred and it’s not going anywhere. But while Conor Oberst will maintain his stance on being a liberal, while he sounds folkier now than he did when he first started, while his songs are slower and sometimes even dragging, he’s grown up. He’s not the twenty-year-old writing songs like If Winter Ends anymore, and that’s sad, but that’s life. Looking at it from this perspective, this album is just as daring as Bright Eyes’ previous releases were. Maybe it doesn’t have everything that an old school Bright Eyes fan is looking for—that song that you heard echoing off the lockers as you walked through your high school hallway by yourself to get to class. But Conor Oberst has never been one to sell-out, and this is continuing proof. He knows somewhere that the reason he’s popular was because the kids could relate to him, but when he wanted to change, he changed. And of course he’s changed. He is not singing for you, after all. –Nicole Wertheim

Last Modified : June 27th, 2007
Filed under : THE RECORD BIN, reviews, rock
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