Bright Eyes' new live album, cobbled together from recordings of the I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning tour, opens with the requisite applause. Buried in this applause a female voice shouts, "Conor, I love you!". Not "you rock," not "I love your music," but "I love you." It's a helpful clue toward understanding his widespread popularity-- Oberst's intimate, earnest music is calibrated for maximum personal identification; it's an invitation for fans to feel not just privy to his private life, but complicit in it. The magnetism of the music is in its jolts of recognition, those moments when mental states that one thought were private, from within the solipsism of youth, are revealed as universal.
Another telling audience response occurs during the quiet rendition of "Landlocked Blues", when a smattering of cheers follows the line "If you love something, give it away." It could refer to Oberst's songs, with their tacit promise to not simply entertain, but to unveil something of the messy humanity of their author. In fact, it's a summary of Oberst's entire lyrical perspective and the collective twentysomething suburban worldview it excavates, an expression of the tension between two conflicting desires: For lasting security and galvanizing change. Musically, Oberst finds himself in a similarly transitional state, somewhere between the tortured no-fi manqué he was and the mellowed country singer he's becoming, and the same tension that enriches his lyrics creates some minor hitches in his musical delivery.
The Bright Eyes I grew up with-- literally, we being the same age-- was always best on his own. I must've seen him play at least 10 times in my late teens and early twenties, and the most memorable performance of them all was a post-Fevers and Mirrors solo show where he shuddered, sweated, whispered, and howled over shattered-glass chords. Emotional and musical nudity make good bedfellows. And while all those vocal tics are still intact, they've been subdued-- probably for the best, in the long run. But for now, he sounds like he's still working out a new way of singing that suits the thicker country-rock arrangements he began to favor on Lifted, sometimes faltering in a sort of stifled mid-range.
His band is tight, but Oberst sounds a bit tense and weighed down on heavily embellished tracks like "At the Bottom of Everything" and Lua B-side "True Blue". The tuneless protest song "When the President Talks to God" is another hat that doesn't quite fit, although it's pretty clearly included for political and not musical reasons, and draws approving screams from the audience. Oberst trips over a cover of Feist's wonderful "Mushaboom", failing to really own its tripping melody, faring better on Elliot Smith's "The Biggest Lie". But the most glaring example of Oberst attempting to overwrite the old Bright Eyes comes with Fevers and Mirrors' "A Scale, a Mirror and Those Indifferent Clocks", here tellingly billed simply as "Scale". Instead of reproducing its original muzziness, he couches it in I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning's genial country style, and it sounds good, if a little defanged.
Barring "True Blue" and "When the President Talks to God", each of which weds overly clever lyrics to lackluster arrangements, nothing on Motion Sickness falls terribly flat-- the several uncertain-sounding tunes are simply a bit tepid, and the remainder are lovely. Oberst sounds great on "Make War", against its lean backdrop of guitar, pedal steel and light percussion, working the dreamy melody with aplomb and timing his screams effectively with the musical crescendos. On "Landlocked Blues" he seems relaxed, comfortable amid the barely-there guitars. His voice softens and opens up, threading a tremulous quaver through its easy melody. When the horn section makes a late appearance, it's effective, punctuating the quiet expanse that came before it. "Method Acting" plays well, avoiding swollen gestures in favor of sharp, driving rock, and "Southern State" is terrific, as Oberst sings confidently over a gentle arrangement including a horn solo that's expressive, not bombastic. He simply doesn't wear bombast as convincingly as he once did, and seems to know it-- this album finds him maneuvering toward a new equilibrium, one that's shaping up, judging from its most successful tracks, to be as measured and deliberate as his old songs were anarchic and accidental.
