To question Bright Eyes for returning with a country album is somewhat akin to dissing Girls Aloud for deploying suggestive choreography, or Arctic Monkeys for coming from Sheffield and playing with the gain turned up. And yet when the first single, ‘Four Winds’, and eventually ‘Cassadaga’ showed up, that was exactly what we did. And it’s not that his electronic ‘Digital Ash…’ distractions led to distorted expectations – with distance, while adding to the richness of his body of work, it felt like a token gesture rather than a surge into a brave new world. The acoustic delicacy of its twin, ‘I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning’, was the more dependable of the pair. The thing is, what defined Conor Oberst in the past, what made him such a hypnotic proposition, are aspects aside from the type of music he choose as a vessel. The things you noticed were his sometimes barbed and wired, sometimes sweet but always endearing turn of phrase, and particularly his boundless self-belief, the aggressive glint in his creative eye, the almost anarchic instinct evident when he approached the tradition which props up his act.
And so to find all that character stripped back to bone when it wasn’t locked down in solitude, the hair pulled out of its eyes, its bootstraps pulled tight, begged questions. If you are to mature, to offer us an alternative by indeed not being alternative, not so much alt-country as just country, a whistling, Stetson-tipping Ry Cooder-esque normalcy, what is it that we should look to you for now? If you are to gather musicians – fiddle, pedal steel guitar, piano, electric organ – not as a rabble, not as a means to satisfy the burgeoning sound designs in your head that are beyond the capabilities of your own two hands, but to create a tidy quilt in which your songs can find comfort, where are we to find the excitement that countered your conformity previously? We liked you because you were more than Ryan Adams, you weren’t making the most innovative music, but neither were the boundaries of your comfort zone distinct.
But lurking behind the pretty, attended-to façade are signposts to the Bright Eyes you recognise, even if the road is less rocky than it once was. The lyrics for one in quality and volume are more peerless and persuasive than ever – endless creative couplets meaningful both in isolation and as part of a wider narrative – and they’re really given space to shine against the lush simplicity of the backdrop. See ‘Soul Singer In A Session Band’, ‘Classic Cars’ and particularly the free-flowing ‘I Must Belong Somewhere’ (this album’s ‘Waste Of Paint’) for evidence. And the band, while not in a splinter-your-instrument-over-your-knee mood, are warm and accomplished to the hilt, Anton Patzner’s violin work especially capable of taking your breath away. The album’s many collaborators, from M.ward to Gillian Welch to Janet Weiss, merely act as guarantors as to the quality of the material on board, rather than anything as serious as a selling point. The songwriting is full of ebbs, flows and subtle nuances and while traditional ‘Cassadaga’ is far from one dimensional – take in the Bacharach-esque melancholy of ‘Clairaudients’ and ‘Lime Tree’. Question answered, then.