Conor Oberst must be a very busy man. The prolific 27 year-old has released 12 full length albums with Bright Eyes in the last decade, numerous side projects and collaborations, has toured at length over that span, and worked hard promoting pet label Saddle Creek and its precocious “brother label” Team Love. Now I’m not one to criticize an artist’s quantity of output (unless that artist is Ryan Adams and the output is 11 albums in a month), but sometimes bands just have to know when to say no. The new Bright Eyes Four Winds EP might just be such a case. The release of the EP is meant to whet the appetite for Cassadaga, the full length follow-up to 2005’s I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, which in a month will render this EP irrelevant. It’s not that the EP isn’t good, it’s just kind of pointless. As a friend of mine put it, “It’s an album with one country song, a pop song, what sounds like a Fevers and Mirrors b-side, and other songs that just don’t mesh that well together.”
The first and strongest track, “Four Winds,” is a spirited country-tinged tune. Lyrically and musically, it’s right up there with some of Bright Eyes’ best. Oberst sings about newly orphaned refugees and the whore of Babylon, his tone alternating between a sneer and jovial sing-along. The clash between the subject matter and catchy melody builds a tension that resonates long after the song is over. As the only song featured on both the EP and the forthcoming album, it has certainly piqued my interest in Cassadaga. “Reinvent the Wheel” ironically doesn’t bring much new to the table, but it is a decent song nonetheless. “Stray Dog Freedom” on the other hand is a marked departure from anything they’ve done in the past. Its jamming guitars are reminiscent of Steely Dan and other big guitar classic rockers from the 70s. The songs on the EP don’t really fit together, but they do showcase Oberst’s varied styles and songwriting talent.
The acoustic “Tourist Trap” is the most Bright-Eyesy on the album, featuring everything fans love to hear and detractors love to hate. The tortured vocals, first-person lyrics rife with metaphor, and simple instrumentation, are similar to “Lua,” “A Song to Pass the Time,” or any other of a dozen songs. If you like Bright Eyes you’ll like the song, and I happen to enjoy it.
“Cartoon Blues” isn’t much of a blues track; it isn’t much of anything really. Though it does contain the tellingly self-referential line, “How did you ever dream up that song/ the one where the baby dies,” referring to an early Bright Eyes song “Padriac My Prince” about a fictional brother who drowned in the bathtub. The line is telling because it assumes the listener is familiar with the Bright Eyes canon— which for this EP might be an accurate assumption. Bright Eyes, and to a greater extent the Saddle Creek family, feels like a tight knit musical community. To the members of that community, and the fans who feel just as much a part of it, it might make sense to listen to a mix of disparate songs and b-sides. But I’d prefer to just skip the appetizer and wait for the main course. |