Of all the good and not-so-good qualities you can ascribe to Conor Oberst, "ensemble player" isn't one of them. It's not just that his work as Bright Eyes has essentially always been a solo vision, but that he felt the need to name it "Bright Eyes" in the first place, using a collective nom de plume, in the process adding an extra level of presumptive self-sustaining wholeness. More to the point, there's Oberst's artistic persona itself-- his aggrieved yelp, his poetic bloodletting, his political hectoring, and his perpetual navel gaze, which have combined to attract admirers and detractors with equal fervency.
To date, there's not been a whole lot of room for anyone else in Bright Eyes' music, both in the way Oberst sang and in the first-person singular pronouns that so automatically rolled off his tongue. Then came last year's eponymous release under Oberst's actual legal name, and irony of ironies, it turned out to be the most self-effacing, song-driven work of his entire career. Oberst made the album with a newly assembled cadre of players dubbed the Mystic Valley Band, yet it was still solely his name and mug on the cover and almost exclusively his voice and songs on the CD. Which is why it's still hard not to do a double-take upon viewing the credits for Outer South, already tellingly released under the banner of Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, and seeing that a full seven of the album's 16 songs aren't sung by indie-rock's former enfant terrible, and that six of those seven weren't penned by him either.
However, Oberst hasn't displayed any modesty within the songs he did write and sing. A full subsuming of Oberst's personality would severely dilute his music's power, but Outer South seems to actually undo many of the beneficially humbling gains made by his last record. Unquestionably, there are dazzlers here, foremost the ripping power-popper "Cabbage Town" and the equally pleasing, jangly "Spoiled", which cannily evokes the ramshackle charm of 1980s R.E.M. and the Cure. Another plus, "To All the Lights in the Windows" gets over on a facile, open-hearted refrain in spite of Oberst's lyrical attempts to bite off more history and myth than he can chew.
Unfortunately, that last qualifier also applies to a few of Oberst's other efforts on Outer South. First single "Nikorette" finds him engaged in one of his regrettably favorite sports-- passing self-satisfied judgments on his fellow man, pronouncing, "There's nothing sadder than a lynching mob/ Full of rational men who believe in God." "Ten Women" and "White Shoes" are stultifyingly ponderous, and of Oberst's songs of sober fervor only "Roosevelt Room" hits its mark, with Oberst remembering his great Desaparecidos trick of replacing Deep Thoughts with pure bile, flashing admirable oppositional rancor at a time when lots of his left-leaning friends are lining up to kiss Obama's hem. Of course, then "I Found a Reason #2" arrives and we have to deal with Oberst eating up the old 60s tropes all over again, from evoking Rolling Stone to nakedly aspiring to be the next Dylan, pealing organs and all.
And remember, these things are taking place on an album that features songwriting and singing contributions from people not named Conor Oberst. As you might expect, Oberst's reversion to logorrhea and emotional extremism here effectively eliminates the possibility that Outer South will possess any ensemble cohesion. There aren't too many personalities with the panache to butt into Oberst's spotlight, and yet his co-conspirators here seem inherently milquetoast-y regardless of context. Jason Boesel ("Difference Is Time", "Eagle on a Pole") does boast a pleasantly dusky, Matt Berninger-ish croon, but Nik Freitas and especially Taylor Hollingsworth only have reedy nice-boy whines to lend to their tunes. Perhaps it's partly a factor of Oberst's essential attention-grabbing nature, but none of these gentlemen offers up a composition that snags the ear better than the most mundane effort from their fearless leader. Perhaps it's simply the case that Oberst is on a busman's holiday here, but either he failed to get the memo to keep things light, or else he should have recruited some more substantial Wilburys.
