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January 26, 2005
"Ya growns up and ya growns up and ya growns up!"
It's true! Dear god, it's all true.
Sad bastards, rejoice! For your King has returned unto thee!
I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, one of two new releases from pop-indie megastar (it's a relative scale, darlings) Bright Eyes, is as good as you'd hoped/feared it would be. Yes, it's a much more mature outing and blah blah blah... But mostly it's just really good.
The primary reason that we can call I'm Wide Awake a home run compared to Lifted's solid base hit is that, instead of being all about how hard it is to be Bright Eyes, the overnight sensation, the new record is very much about how hard it is to be Conor Oberst, the guy. As such, it's also about how hard it is to be pretty much anybody. The absence of forced diffidence towards the hated rock critic is a welcome one, particularly when that hole is filled with--what's the expression... oh yeah: human feeling.
Even the requisite self-indulgent skit that has become boilerplate as the opening to most Bright Eyes records is a (relatively) lean 1:10, and almost manages not to annoy. Lest the importance of this fact go underestimated, we can assure the esteemed reader that, if past released are any indication, it really is no mean feat for Oberst to reign in his penchant for obtuse "cred-building" rambling intros.
Inviting Emmylou Harris to take up the background vocal chores was at once pretty gutsy and also maybe a little cheap. As others have said, it's clearly an attempt to legitimize this recording as being just plain folk, in the traditionally traditional sense, and not some sort of hyphenated mess. And indeed, it does have the effect of making the folk more folksy. So, as we said, the move was gusty, since it amounts to a clear setting of a goal--one that could easily be missed and missed badly. But, one could argue that Oberst was trying to trade on somebody else's ready-made (and richly deserved) credentials. We're not inclined to lodge that complaint, but it's there.
We want to quibble about how, this time around, Oberst does a lot of New York namechecking. We want to, but it happened that we were writing something that did kind of the same thing on our way to buy this record. Grrr.
As you well know, there is another new Bright Eyes full-length which shows Oberst flexing his pop muscles, while Mike Mogis works his programming chops. As regards this record, we can offer only a resounding "meh."
Posted by matt at January 26, 2005 12:13 PM
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