Bright Eyes - Cassadaga

Bright Eyes’ new album is his latest piece of work since the lazy live album, "Motion Sickness".

I’m not entirely sure if this album is meant to be an anti-war album, a religious album, or just a full of your own self importance album. Maybe it’s all three.

In terms of its political angle, it follows along with the mass, grandiose style over production of recent 'political' albums such as Green Day’s “American Idiot”, whilst keeping the grainy lyrical rhetoric of Neil Young’s “Living With War”.

And funnily enough, it seems to me that Bright Eyes’ frontman Conor Oberst would rather be prancing around with these rockstars, shouting about how wrong war in Iraq is and how evil the Republicans are. Fair enough, he’s not quite gone the same lengths as Bono, in becoming that full of himself, but maybe he isn’t so far off. With this new album, I think the only thing he’s missing is Courtney Cox getting up on stage for a dance.

It’s not going to be fashionable any time soon, to promote war in Iraq, but it’s certainly getting passe listening to our indie heroes moan on about it.

So we’ll get the formalities out of the way, the bit that you’ll read in every review you’ll read of this album. Cassadaga is a spiritualist camp in Florida. Oberst’s recently travelled there with a friend. I’m not sure what he found there, to be honest, I’m more concerned with what he lost.

Oberst’s lo-fi glory days have faded away, and it really does pain me to say it.

Occassionally we do have a brilliant lyric from Oberst, but too often there’s throw away lines and clichés. Songs that would sound so much better with Oberst bashing seven shades of shit out of an old battered acoustic, have been replaced by strings, slide guitar and backing vocals that remind me of Hall & Oates for some reason. And it appears that Oberst is actually trying to put on the frailties in his voice, so insincere.

The political aspects of this album are tired. The religious themes are annoying. His self importance and smugness are become extremely patronising.

It’s just all a little bit too much for me at the moment. Perhaps I’ll come back to this album in a few months time, or maybe a few years time, but I really can’t see it. As a fan of Bright Eyes’ career, it’s really unpleasant to fall out with music you love.

It’s not quite as bad as splitting up with a girlfriend, but it’s certainly as bad as losing touch with a good friend, and knowing that something has changed, and things won’t really ever be the way they used to be.

The album came out yesterday, the 9th of April.