Conor Oberst is a 34-year old married man. He’s been a musician in the public eye for nearly half of his life, and over the past decade, he’d be most accurately described as a folk artist. His latest album Upside Down Mountain is being released on Nonesuch, a label whose release slate includes the Black Keys, Natalie Merchant, and Nickel Creek. The cover art is designed by one of the guys in the Felice Brothers, and he’ll be trekking around the country with Dawes. The moment you hear Oberst sing, though, you will forget every single one of these facts and remember every positive and negative association you have with Bright Eyes instead*—*there’s just no mistaking him for anyone else at this point, and it’s unclear how he feels about that. While claiming “this is a return to an earlier way I wrote", Upside Down Mountain is Oberst’s latest documentation of his obsessions with escape, death, the passing of time, and the potential of finding serenity in an assumed identity.
That said, Upside Down M**ountain isn't a Bright Eyes album, so Oberst’s not driven by the same incessant need for romantic and artistic validation that kept him going until Lifted, nor will circumstances ever align the way they did for his protracted 2005 critical breakthrough. On the plus side of the ledger, you can understand what the hell Oberst is talking about most of the time on Upside Down Mountain, which makes it an immediate improvement over Cassadaga and The People’s Key, two albums that somehow managed to be cryptic and pedantic at the same time.
Besides possessing one of the strongest melodies Oberst has ever penned (and there are plenty here), “Time Forgot” is a welcome reintroduction to the guy who never had trouble getting his point across. Here, he longs to grow a beard, to be left alone, to let the wind scatter thoughts, to just listen. This puts him in a similar mindset as he was on his self-titled record from 2008, the last truly great thing he’s put his name on. But there’s been an unmistakable change of perspective*—*on Conor Oberst cuts like “I Don’t Want to Die (In the Hospital)”, death was impending because he was Conor Oberst, the wildly talented and self-destructive rock singer. Here, he’s not chasing death, but death will catch up with him because he’s Conor Oberst, human being.
The most resonant moments of Upside Down Mountain follow suit in deconstructing Oberst’s myth of himself*—during the otherwise chintzy, rhinestone cowboy pop of “Hundreds of Ways”, “I hope I am forgotten when I die” is the most poisonously enunciated line on the LP. Meanwhile, on the mesmerizing minor-key whisper of “Artifact #1”, Oberst just wants to be forgotten while he’s alive__—*__“I don’t want a second chance to be an object of desire/ if that means slipping through your hands.” Sometimes he even has a sense of humor about it all; though “Kick” is addressed to a luckless Kennedy, it’s not a “Diane Young”-style philosophical treatise, but rather one fuck-up relating to another. And when he admonishes a self-absorbed drunk during “Enola Gay”’s rummy strut, it might just be himself. The evocation of solitude in a crowded club links it back to his atomic self-pitying from Digital Ash in a Digital Urn's “Hit the Switch”, but anyone can learn from its hook: “The world’s mean, getting meaner too/ So why do you have to make it all about you?”
But elsewhere on Upside Down Mountain, he wields populist observation like a politician, trying to utilize his homespun wisdom from an elevated plane. Over a decade ago, he claimed “There is no truth, there is only you/ And what you make the truth”, and that sounds more convincing than his attempts to convey his own version of the truth as the genuine article. During “Time Forgot”, he muses, “They say everyone has a choice to make/ To be loved or to be free”, but, really, who says that? He’s got a lot of big ideas about love throughout*—*“True love hides like city stars”, “Love was the message...full stop”, “Freedom is the opposite of love”, “Our love is a protective poison”, “There is no dignity in love.” It's easy to think of him like Don Draper, hacking out emotionally manipulative and impeccably worded pitches on a Coronet until something sticks.
His facility with pat truths is most evident in “You Are Your Mother’s Child”, a song that bears an instant resemblance to I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning's* *homemade valentine “First Day of My Life” in its unadorned simplicity. It’s open-ended enough to be adopted by anyone who wants it to be about their child, but after a striking, writerly first verse, an adolescent’s all-American upbringing feels less like an actual person’s experience than it does a songwriting exercise. It could’ve been written about anyone, but it also could’ve been written by anyone.
But it couldn’t have been sung that way, and the saving grace of Upside Down Mountain is that it makes the case for Oberst as a truly unique and remarkable vocalist. Earlier in his career, his tremble, quaver and vibrato were seen as affectations of an amateur, but here they're all confidently and carefully utilized like a mastered instrument. For the most part, it gives character to gauzy C&W like “Double Life” and the chugga-chugga festival-folk of “Zigzagging Toward The Light”, but he still has a way of throwing in awkward phrases that stick in your craw like popcorn kernels*—*“Snickers bar”, “Japanese arcade”, “Klonopin eyes”, and the pronunciation of “parlour trick” to sound like “politrick.”
One line in particular stands out*—*“I stole all the rhinestones from Carolina/ And sold them out in Bakersfield for cash.” Maybe it’s playing to and against type as the rambling folk artist, since Carolina and Bakersfield are as real as it gets, even if they’re being used as placeholders. It's the kind of line Ryan Adams would unspool—a fitting association since Upside Down Mountain is essentially Oberst’s Ashes & Fire. It's gorgeous to the point of near gaudiness, a “return to form” after a strange decade evolving from wildly prolific, heartbreak soundtracking, Winona Ryder-dating enfant terrible into a domesticated Americana bard no longer interested in why to be young is to be sad. Hopefully, Oberst will find a way to make "older and wiser" just as revelatory.
