BRIGHT EYES : I'M WIDE AWAKE, IT'S MORNING

BRIGHT EYES : I'M WIDE AWAKE, IT'S MORNING

At the Bottom of Everything
We Are Nowhere and It's Now
Old Soul Song (for the New World Order)
Lua
Train Under Water
First Day of My Life
Another Travelin' Song
Land Locked Blues
Poison Oak
Road to Joy

Label : Saddle Creek Records

Length : 45:41

Released : 2005

Review (AllMusic) : When writing about Conor Oberst, the singer/songwriter who records with an ever-changing group of musicians under the name Bright Eyes, it's customary to state his age within the first few sentences of the piece. It is also not uncommon to read comparisons between this Nebraskan singer/songwriter and Bob Dylan, the best-known singer/songwriter to hail from the Midwest. This serves a specific purpose -- to establish a context for Oberst's songwriting, to imply that he's some kind of "genius," not in the least for writing and recording albums at such a young age, particularly since he's been recording since the age of 13. And so many albums, too! Taking a page from the Robert Pollard handbook, he equates prolificacy with profoundness, releasing multiple records each year, sometimes under different band names. All these pop critic clichés repeated ad infinitum in the new millennium's overheated media circuit settled into conventional wisdom not long after the release of his fourth proper album, Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, in 2002. Positive reviews, all praising his ambition, endless lyrics, and apparent sincerity, flowed in and a cult started to form around Oberst. By 2004, he was nearly inescapable, appearing everywhere from The O.C. -- where Lifted was part of the Seth Cohen Starter Pack -- to representing the younger generation on Moveon.org's Vote for Change tour (which could be a reason why John Kerry couldn't motivate collegiate voters), culminating in Bright Eyes suddenly and surprisingly topping the Billboard singles charts with two singles. All this set the stage for the release of a pair of new Bright Eyes albums in the first weeks of 2005: the acoustic-based I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning and the electronic-inflected Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. The timing is no accident: big albums are rarely released in the musical graveyard of January, so Oberst had no competition for headlines this time around. He was in every magazine, from Rolling Stone to Newsweek, and the reviews were uniformly positive, trotting out all the familiar "gifted youth" and "next Dylan" boilerplate, but this time, there was a difference. Most reviews were written from the perspective that it was taken for granted that this kid sure was a genius, the next great rock & roll star. It was as if standing on-stage with Michael Stipe and Bruce Springsteen in the fall of 2004 was tantamount to Oberst inheriting their throne as rock statesmen, even if his music has little, if anything, to do with that of R.E.M. or the Boss, or for anything that could be construed as mass popular music, for that matter. Oberst comes from the post-ironic stream of indie rock, not quite emo but certainly not part of the arch, alternately ironic and bittersweet aesthetic that marked the style's heyday in the first two-thirds of the '90s. He's leapfrogged over Chris Carrabba in Dashboard Confessional to be the figurehead for how a certain strand of modern rock is judged solely on whether it's a personal emotional expression or not, never taking into account such niceties as craft, in either music or lyrics, or in the sheer impact of the music. It's a million miles removed from the sprawling narratives of Springsteen, the jangled Southern mysticism of R.E.M., or certainly, the poetry and roadhouse rock & roll of Bob Dylan, and nowhere is that clearer than on I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, Oberst's first high-profile, straight-ahead singer/songwriter record. Last time around, Oberst shoved all of his interests into one long, overstuffed pseudo-epic, but with I'm Wide Awake and Digital Ash, he isolates the country-rock confessionals on the former and saves the messy modernistic indie rock for the latter, as if to counter the criticisms that he can't focus. I'm Wide Awake is designed as a nakedly honest singer/songwriter album, somewhat inspired by the classics of the genre in the '70s -- he even recruits Emmylou Harris for some harmonies, hoping that some of the old Gram Parsons magic will rub off -- but its directness reveals that the emperor has no clothes. Stripped of the careening, dramatic, meandering arrangements of Lifted, Oberst's music seems not simpler, but simplistic, the plodding music acting as a bed for monochromatic melodies that merely serve as a delivery mechanism for all those words he's poured out on the page. Far from being the second coming of Dylan, Oberst is as precious as Paul Simon, but without any sense of rhyme or meter or gift for imagery, puking out lines filled with cheap metaphors and clumsy words that don't scan. Supporters excuse this as soul searching, but the heavy-handed pretension in the words and the affectedness in his delivery -- not to mention the quavering bleat that's halfway between Feargal Sharkey and the Dead Milkmen's Rodney Anonymous -- give the whole enterprise a sense of phoniness that's only enhanced by its unadorned production. When Oberst was swallowed in the deliberate grandeur of Lifted, his drama-queen theatrics fit the music, but here, they expose him for the shallow poseur he is. As the record winds down, it's clear that Bright Eyes is little more than a pretty boy in a sweater whose idea of being clever is appropriating Beethoven's Ode to Joy for "Road to Joy" -- a move that makes you grateful that Billy Joel at least knew enough Beethoven to steal a lesser-known melody for "This Night" (and, being the standup guy that he is, Billy gave him a co-writing credit, something Conor doesn't do here). Digital Ash in a Digital Urn is designed to be the musical polar opposite to I'm Wide Awake, to be the ambitious, modernistic electronic record that stands in contrast to the sepia-toned, classicist acoustic LP, but it suffers from nearly all the same flaws as its companion. The production and arrangements may have changed, but the music still serves as little more than a vehicle for Oberst's tortured prose. Here, the lines are clipped instead of languid as they are on I'm Wide Awake, but instead of scaling back his words and sharpening his attack, he piles on even more words, littering the songs with awkward allusions and clunky couplets. While the music moves the words forward more here than on I'm Wide Awake, it's merely as punctuation for certain lyrical phrases, not for the song as a whole. Nevertheless, that variety in the music makes Digital Ash a more interesting listen than its companion, but only up to a certain point. Ultimately, it's hard not to feel that this album is little more than a blatant attempt to ape the Postal Service's Give Up, right down to Jimmy Tamborello's appearance halfway through the LP. Not that rip-offs are necessarily a bad thing -- it's at the heart of pop music -- but since Oberst lacks the most basic musical skill, which is to know how to make music sound good on a sheer sonic level, Digital Ash collapses in a mess of preening pretension. And don't chalk up its weakness to youth, either, or suggest that he'll get better with age. Paul McCartney was 22 at the height of Beatlemania. At the age of 23, Dylan made Bringing It All Back Home, Neil Young released Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, and Jackson Browne cut his debut. Kurt Cobain was 24 when Nirvana recorded Nevermind, the same age Conor Oberst was when he released the pair of albums that prove without a shadow of a doubt that instead of reaching musical maturity, he's wallowing in a perpetual adolescence.

Review (Wikipedia) : 'm Wide Awake, It's Morning is one of two Bright Eyes albums (along with Digital Ash in a Digital Urn) released on January 25, 2005, by Saddle Creek Records. The album is the 72nd release of Saddle Creek Records. he single "Lua" reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Sales Chart. The music video for "First Day of My Life" was directed by John Cameron Mitchell. "Road to Joy" contains an interpolation of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy". The title of the album is taken from a lyric in this song. "We Are Nowhere and It's Now" appears in the 2007 film Knocked Up. They achieved success in the charts when the singles "Lua" and "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)" took the top two positions in the Billboard Hot Singles Sales chart in 2004, and in 2005 the band set off on a two-part world tour to promote their new albums, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. The first half of the tour promoted the folk-influenced first album, and the latter half featured the more electronic second album. Both records made it into the Top 20 of the Billboard album charts. The tour was captured on Motion Sickness, released later in the year. Like the two Bright Eyes albums before it, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning opens with a spoken recording, this time by Conor Oberst himself. The monologue is a short story about two strangers on an airplane that is about to fall into the ocean. Nearing the crash, one of the passengers begins to sing, "At the Bottom of Everything," the opening song of the album. The simple, three-chord folk song is one of Oberst's trademark sarcastic social commentaries on American ideals: "We must memorize nine numbers and deny we have a soul. And in this endless race for property and privilege to be won, we must run..." This song made its television debut on the April 30, 2004 episode of Late Late Show. The short story was replaced with a dedication to the Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the President of the United States, George W. Bush. "Two men I admire a lot," declared Oberst, "for their biceps and for their creepy, fascist agendas," after which Conor counted the song in "1, 2, 666." The conclusion of the story during the bridge was replaced by Oberst shouting "M. Ward for president!" A music video directed by Cat Solen and starring Evan Rachel Wood and Terence Stamp was later made for the song, based on the story in its introduction, which remained intact. I'm Wide Awake It's Morning received very positive reviews from music critics on both sides of the Atlantic. It was placed in the following best-of lists for the year 2005.

Review (Humo) : Drie jaar geleden titelde Bright Eyes (né Conor Oberst, de frontman is ook min of meer de groep) zijn derde studioplaat doodleuk 'Lifted or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground'. Dat 'Lifted...' toen niet het verhoopte succes had, moet aan die niet te verhapstukken titel hebben gelegen, want wij hebben de plaat in de marge van deze recensie nog eens beluisterd, en amaai, we vielen wéér van onze stoel: zo straf! Gemakkelijk maakt de Amerikaan het zijn publiek niet. Anno 2005 valt het met de lengte van zijn cd-titels nogal mee, maar nu acht Bright Eyes het moment weer rijp om twee platen TEGELIJKERTIJD uit te brengen! En als 'I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning' en 'Digital Ash in a Digital Urn' (los te koop vanaf volgend weekend) nu nog enigszins in mekaars verlengde hadden gelegen, allà, maar neen hoor, absoluut niet! Een blik op de gastenlijst geeft het verschil al aan: op 'I'm Wide Awake...' doen onder anderen Emmylou Harris en Jesse Harris (de voormalige rechterhand van Norah Jones) mee, op het experimentele 'Digital Ash...' is een gastrol weggelegd voor gitarist Nick Zinner van de onstuimige Yeah Yeah Yeahs. De eerste plaat is een singer/songwriter-cd uit de eredivisie, de tweede een brutale(re) gitaarplaat, mét additional programming en een verscheiden, bevreemdend instrumentarium - van theramin over fluit tot het strijkerskwartet The Summit Strings. Een fijne cd, die wij u van harte zouden hebben aanbevolen als er dus niet 'I'm Wide Awake...' was geweest. Want nu de sperperiode voor het gebruik van de term 'eindejaarslijstje' voortijdig is opgeheven (zie de recensie hierboven), mag het vrank & vrij gezegd worden: ook 'I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning' zal over elf maanden herinnerd worden. En hoe! De tien nummers klokken gemiddeld ruim boven de vier minuten af, maar vervelen doen ze geen seconde. Denk niet aan het licht-weemoedige, breekbare van Emmylou Harris, denk ook niet aan country-rock, neen: zij heeft zich aangepast aan de kartelige indie roots-rock van hem. Samen tekenen Oberst en Harris voor drie hoogtepunten, duetten die ook model staan voor de verscheidenheid op de rest van deze fantastische plaat: 'We Are Nowhere and It's Now' is een gedempt luisterliedje (met een glansrol voor trompettist Nate Walcott), 'Another Travelin' Song' bruist en briest (aandoenlijk hoe de ontketende, 24-jarige Oberst de gedistingeerde, 57-jarige Harris bijna tot schreeuwen dwingt) en de kale, uitgebeende, door de schallende trompet van Walcott middendoor gekliefde folkblues 'Land Locked Blues', die ongetwijfeld goedkeurend meegelipt wordt door Bob Dylan (aan deze zijde) en Gram Parsons (aan gindse zijde). Voeg bij die pracht ook nog de single 'Lua', 'Old Soul Song (for the New World Order)' en de woeste afsluiter 'Road to Joy' (om van de andere nummers nog maar te zwijgen) en u weet: sterk van begin tot eind. In 'Road to Joy' zingt Oberst: 'I could have been a famous singer, if I had someone else's voice'; dat bedoelt de ex van Winona Ryder intussen ongetwijfeld als grap. (Bright Eyes speelt op 21 februari in de Botanique in Brussel. Ga dat zien, nu het nog in een klein zaaltje kan!)