Bright Eyes

America's oldest teenager follows up his 2005 crossover into mass appeal with this rustic indie rock wonder. Cassadaga mixes the Arcade Fire's paranoia with Wilco's Americana and the Beatles experimentalism but it still sounds like vintage Connor Oberst. While the lyrics cower through questions about God, the future and the meaning of it all, the music stands tall on its aching melodies, creamy pop hooks and arm waving choruses. In a perfect world, numbers like "Four Winds" would be shouted out by entire high school football teams. In the actual world, tunes like "Make a Plan to Love Me" and "Coat Check Dream Song" will be quietly savored by students in AP classes across the land.

It doesn’t take a soothsayer to predict that in April 2007, American alt-rock fans will learn
en masse that the new Bright Eyes album is named after a spiritualist community in Florida –
100 adult residents including 40 certified mediums, says Google. How much alt-rock needs
to know this is another question, as is whether alt-rock needs the voice-over auntie whose
nattering about psychic this-and-that vies with the discordant orchestration for t... More >

Musically, Cassadaga is a fully formed synthesis of the catch-as-catch-can expansiveness of Coner Oberst's Lifted-era bands with the country tendencies that have always undergirded his Middle American vocals. Longtime enabler Mike Mogis is everywhere, playing 10 instruments all told, and Nate Walcott mans multiple keyboards and arranges strings and woodwinds. In short, Oberst's prog and jam-band tendencies are both subsumed by a sensibility that's Americana in a winning, all-embracing sense--Americanapolitan, let's call it. And for the most part the material measures up. The first song establishes a crisis, the second suggests a quest, and "Soul Singer in a Session Band" explores mid-career artistic confusion like thousands of songs before it, only more memorably. Topping them all are "Classic Cars," as fine a reflection on June-September love as Rod Stewart's "Maggie May," and "Make a Plan to Love Me," for a career woman who whatever her real-life identity is not unlike millions of young women embroiled in similar romantic contradictions. With the help of four professional backup girls cooing the title hook, maybe Oberst will inspire a few resolutions. (Grade - ****)