Bright Eyes gets away with sounding like Bright Eyes because he's Bright Eyes; David Dondero sounds a lot (sometimes exactly) like Bright Eyes but comes off okay, in part because he wears his quavering death-rattle un-suburbanly, and his steamer trunk's pasted with enough regional labels for the traveling folk-rocker stance to ring authentically. Considering the wealth of detailed lyrics and quirky lo-fi maneuvers that distinguish Dondero's songs, it's weird how often they send his critical admirers rummaging through the cliché bin, exhuming the phrase "road-weary troubadour" and all the belabored imagery that attends it. It's probably just because there's so much content to absorb: While the music is sparse, Dondero's wordier than teenage webzine reviewer. He reels off lyrics quickly and almost constantly, inundating the listener with a dense tide of imagery and vernacular.
On his sixth album, Dondero beats Sujfan to the punch by making a record about Florida, the country's extended middle finger and the place most like home for the wandering singer. The concept is clearest in geography-heavy songs like the title track and "Brownsville Revival". The latter is a lugubrious acoustic dirge that makes its religious iconography work overtime to contain a ponderous narrative about a bereaved father who asks a church congregation to bring his daughter back to life. The former, a sort of sociopolitical essay set to mellifluous guitars and elegiac horns, brims with purple skies and orange trees, air so thick you have to cut a slice to breathe, aquifers and swamps, hollowed out high-rises, and $30 beachfront motels. Dondero's affection for the physical aspects of Florida is apparent as they scroll dreamily through the visual frame, and his politics fill in the gaps: An appeal to muggers that "if you're poor like me then let poor people like me be" and a lament for the formerly artistic Cuban district, "now a mall-like atmosphere, homogenous and insincere."
But Dondero's lyrical ambition sometimes leads him astray, and for ever finely-turned image-- the South Beach mannequins smelling of coconuts and Coppertone, for instance-- there's a conceit that's uncomfortably proud of its cleverness, like the predictable rags-to-riches-to-rags arc of gambling yarn "Laying Low in Eli, Nevada". And for every time Dondero nails the honest straightforwardness that's become his métier ("You could sing a simple song and still get lost in the complexities," he sings over the psychedelic hitches of "Let Go the Past"), another lyric teeters on the brink of triteness. Still, Dondero's able to turn out striking images and concepts in his quest to forget the past and keep the future supple, from biting into a lightning bolt on "South of the South" to the willed amnesia of "Journal Burning Party" to the vivid language of his ode to a codependent relationship, "Pornographic Love Song", with its "circus riding hips" and "desperate puke stained grin." Dondero's better when he focuses more on his facility with language, less on puns and recycled sentimentality, but these deceptively rudimentary songs charm even when they don't exactly wow.
