[music] BRIGHT EYES - Digital Ash In A Digital Urn and I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning (S

A friend of mine watched his logs on a certain filesharing network very carefully over the last few days, keeping track of what people downloaded from him. The results: twice as many people wanted Digital Ash In A Digital Urn as I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, the other of the two (fraternal) twin albums Bright Eyes release this next Tuesday. Twice as many! I don't even know what to make of that. Early critical consensus slants the other way, if you trust Metacritic. But word-of-mouth among the self-selectedly fanatical Bright Eyes listeners apparently says Digital Ash is better.

Which is funny, because it is. Considering that Digital has contributions by Jimmy Tamborello of the Postal Service, and that Saddle Creek initially billed it as the 'electronic' album (versus Morning as the 'traditional' one), I expected it to sound JUST like the Postal Service. No shame in that; my fondness for Bright Eyes has never required me to think of them as original. Instead, the beeps and effects distinctly come off as leftovers from Tamborello's drier project Dntel, or maybe persistent collage weirdos The Books. I don't necessarily get the impression Conor Oberst's been listening to Godspeed or Autechre, but that's the broad direction Morning heads in, as opposed to "Emo kids [heart] the 80s too!", as I had both feared and hoped.

I say "leftovers" only because none of the music could carry a track on its own. The shifting backgrounds actually seem to be what Conor needs to sound different. Getting too comfortable with your histrionics is the kiss of death for soft-loud-dynamic-based music (well, no, I guess it rarely is, but it should be), and it had started to seem that all those years of singing about what it was like to be Conor Oberst had finally made him feel steady in his own skin.

A word about that: Most, maybe all, of the people I hear bagging on Oberst for sounding overwrought and immature are, like me, older than he is. I sometimes find it hard to take too, but the guy's done his growing up in public, so if you mistakenly think he's emotionally stunted, or is staying screamy as a crutch against aging, you can just go to your shelf and CHECK. Okay?

Anyway, good record. I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, in contrast, sounds basically like 2002's Lifted, only (I think) shorter. The rut feels surprisingly deep for how few albums Bright Eyes have made: I dig the big swoopy songs, all the yowly solo numbers are lost on me. Hard to get excited. Credit is due, though, for final track "Road To Joy", one of the swoopy ones; with its chorus based around "Ode To Joy", Oberst can take a bow just for it not sounding stupid. I remain agnostic on the question of whether learning to make unironic Beethoven-appropriation the (enjoyable, actually) capstone to your new album is how I would advise a young man to spend six years of his life, but if you've got it, flaunt it.