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Mark Mccord

Bright Eyes

I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning

(Saddle Creek)

Digital Ashes  in a Digital Urn

(Saddle Creek)

Bright Eyes is the vehicle for angst-core hero Conor Oberst, the Lincoln, Nebraska,  25-year-old indie waif hailed as the Dylan of the new millennium.

The nickname is more than a little overblown, but his is a precocious talent that you can't help but expect will one day earn the respect Mr Zimmerman commands. And despite review claims to the contrary, this double release is no Blood on the Tracks. It is, however, an often thrilling, mostly hummable window into the psyche of modern America.

Of the two, Digital Ashes is the most adventurous matching Oberst's tremulous vocals to equally jarring electronic orchestration. The tone is downbeat and the chilling sound affects lend a dark and brooding, metallic and inhuman atmosphere.

Clocks and computerised time are motifs that run throughout the set adding to the dehumanised feel of tracks like Down the Rabbit Hole and Hit the Switch.

Digital Ashes is a diversion from his previous four albums, which for the most part have dealt in the folk-tinged indie-emo displayed in I'm Wide Awake. If any reasonable comparison could be made to Dylan, it's that Oberst similarly doesn't try to compensate for his vocal failings with grand musical gestures. The tunes are simple and the arrangements are kept low in the mix so as to bring greater focus to the lyrics.

Fellow emo tug-alongs Dashboard Confessional - an act with a similarly devoted fan-base - could only dream of such poetic power as is found in Arc of Time or Gold Mine Gutted. Oberst's pained observations of loneliness (his recent move from the sticks to Manhattan have heavily influenced these collections) and his jottings on unrequited love are truly heartbreaking if at times verging on the overwrought nonsensical outpourings of a Jim Morrison fixated high school poet.

By the end of this collection, however, the weight of his angst is a little too much to bear. And without much in the way of tune-smithery to distract, it becomes a bit of a grind.



Bright Eyes