It’s difficult to employ objectivity when critiquing the newest album from a man who soundtracked a grand portion of your adolescence. Every lyric scrawled on school journals and each poster adorning bedroom walls push you towards not slating this latest effort as a stop-gap and largely pointless release. Much has been made of Oberst’s ‘maturing’ over the course of recent country-tinged album efforts with I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Cassadaga. In truth, this is a roundabout way of expressing the homogenisation of Oberst and his creative vehicle Bright Eyes to be more palatable to daytime radio and the American mass market.
That Oberst has chosen to release his latest batch of articulate, country-folk songs under his own name and not the Bright Eyes moniker has been dismissed as pure gimmick by some. Rather there is an important difference between this release and the most-recent Cassadaga: Mike Mogis, his long-time collaborator and producer with who he claims to have an near-telekinetic relationship with, has no input on this release.
So, the album is a stripped-down, electronic and sound-collage-free affair that continues in the songwriting vein of Casadaga. Oberst has recruited the instrumentation of the Mystic Valley Band, a Mexican troupe with whom he shares an apparently harmonious creative process. The album’s production is crisp and clear, focusing on Conor Oberst and his guitar and neglecting to cut out superfluous conversation from the production process like a “Creedence?” here and a “Whenever you‘re ready!” there. It’s a clear attempt to emulate the home recorded happy-go-lucky nature with tapes of his adolescence, but sounds far more contrived and out of place. The first, most obvious flaw in the album is the collection of songs all sound like outtakes from the previous album Cassadaga’s cutting room floor. Other niggles include an unusual smattering of MOR appeal, the tackiest lyrics he’s ever put to pen, and a grating sense of emotional distance. When all these factors are taken at once, the result of the equation is the first major clunker in Conor Oberst’s catalogue.
