Conor Oberst: Conor Oberst

If Conor Oberst shed anything by releasing his new

album under his given name, it was the sense of momentousness that makes Bright

Eyes albums more than something for listeners to put on, play, and ponder only

when they feel like it. That's not a knock against the seriousness of Bright

Eyes as an enterprise, or Conor Oberst as an outgrowth, though there is something

to be savored in the kind of looseness engendered here.

For this record—notable also for coming out

on Merge, as opposed to his stalwart Omaha label, Saddle Creek—Oberst

decamped to Mexico with a group of players he took to calling The Mystic Valley

Band. The songs they came up with still live and die on Oberst's lyrics, which

reach imagistic heights as high as any on Bright Eyes records (Fevers And Mirrors still being the best),

and sometimes even higher. The album opener finds Oberst injecting a rich sense

of place ("Watch the migrants smoke in the old orange grove and the red rocket

blaze over Cape Canaveral") with the kind of emotional shots that make places

ripe for sensing ("I watched your face age backward changing shape in my

memory"). Many of the songs after follow similar travelogue cues, with a

wandering range of sounds and styles to suit. "Sausalito" and "I Don't Want To

Die (In The Hospital)" rock more freely than anything in the Bright Eyes

songbook, and—like much else on an album that counts as more than just a

casual anomaly—Oberst himself sounds enlivened by the chance to listen in

and sing while he's at it.