Bright Eyes
Noise Floor (Rarities 1998-2005)
Saddle Creek Records
Perhaps you’ve been there. You pull a black hoodie over
your tousled hair. For dramatic effect, you suck on a cigarette,
indulging each drag of self-destruction. And that’s when you
put on some Bright Eyes. Oh, what ecstasy ““ how could life be
so dreadful, yet sound so good?
Yes, Bright Eyes is about connection. Those who love his music
can find in troubadour Conor Oberst’s crooning an
articulation of their own melancholy and angst.
“Noise Floor,” the latest album from Oberst and
company, provides those fans with an opportunity to reevaluate why
exactly Oberst’s music makes them so ecstatic ““ and
also why that might not be such a good thing.
The album is an eclectic mix of rarities spanning from 1998 to
2005. The tracks, while not arranged chronologically, comprise a
timeline of Oberst’s evolution as a composer, and similarly
of the ways his music interacts with the emotive listener.
On the album’s earliest track, “Vanishing Act”
(1999), Oberst wails and growls over piano and driving acoustic
guitar, bringing the listener deep into his own maudlin despair.
The sound is raw and the lyrics are intimate. Oberst’s
detractors have called songs like “Vanishing Act”
indulgent and even solipsistic, but those qualities are in fact
what make the songs so appealing. You can feel Oberst’s
emotion, and the plainness and tenderness of it makes it an easy
mirror for your own.
“Amy in the White Coat” (2002), perhaps the
album’s best song, continues that tradition. Over haunting
electric guitar, Oberst tells the heartbreaking story of a
beautiful, damaged girl on whom he had a high school crush. His
voice is less raw and his imagery is more refined, but the intimacy
remains.
Oberst’s work, though, has since expanded from this
tradition. In his latest albums, his poetry tackles themes larger
than the merely personal, and the band’s sound has become
more symphonic and resplendent.
“I Will Be Grateful for this Day” (2001), full of
the same electronic blipping and banging of 2005’s
“Digital Ash in a Digital Urn,” was maybe a precursor
to this new Bright Eyes.
The song creates not so much a mirror for the listener’s
emotion but rather a glorious mural of these feelings with all the
hue and color of Oberst’s tremendous backup band. This new
sound places the listener’s emotions on a pedestal, where
they become something holy, immovable and sacred.
But indulging in his art when we feel at our lowest may in fact
be counterproductive. After all, it’s hard to overcome a mood
that’s being articulated so beautifully.
Because this album is not Bright Eyes at its best, it will be
easier to put down. Next time, however, when listening to one of
Bright Eyes’ better albums, it may behoove fans to consider
why they’re doing it. Is it to indulge, to look in a mirror
or mural full of one’s own melancholy?
In order to feel better, it might just make sense to turn
away.