Part of the pain of listening to Bright Eyes is being unable to find terms adequate to its awfulness. After all, I don’t regularly listen to bad music. There is no one, really no one, to compare it to. To name any name would be to call allies to a mistaken cause.
His music is like clove cigarettes, or a drippings-covered Chianti bottle used as a candle holder, or a sophomore dorm room hung with embroidered gypsy cloths over the doorways, or all three at once while being forced to listen to his music. It is music for people who buy Jake Gyllenhaal DVDs. It is a fondue of smarm.
Audioscrobbler, Gnod and Amazon are not very helpful tools in placing him because the people who listen to Bright Eyes otherwise mostly listen to good music (with exceptions -- Coldplay, Spiritualized and late Ryan Adams). With the same ears they are listening to The Postal Service, The Flaming Lips, Elliott Smith -- oddly, no Leonard Cohen.
To compare Bright Eyes to Bob Dylan or Nick Drake, as I believe some journalists have been doing, is truly criminal. Bob Dylan writes good lyrics and Nick Drake played guitar beautifully. He is like them only in that he would like to be like them, only in that he does very badly what they do well.
Let us proceed calmly to make our case, point by point. First of all, he is unbelievably pretentious. The very name of his band is insufferable, whether taken as vanity or unctuous flattery, as is the title of his most recent album, “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” and the monologue it opens with, about two people seated next to each other on a plane who nonetheless are unable to connect emotionally. Then, surprise, the plane crashes.
Second, his voice is incredibly annoying, as he mewls over hackneyed bar band changes and country-western musical hash still cold in the shape of the can. When Emmylou Harris is piped in to fill things out, the contrast is highly unflattering; only one person is singing.
Third, his songs are mere sketches and unoriginal. He plucks his guitar idly like a ukelele through ponderously slow tempos and old melodies lifted from the radio. Glorious Noise suggests "Lua" is stolen from "You Can't Always Get What You Want," SF Weekly thinks it's the Replacements. Step right up, reader, name that tune and win a prize.
Colin Meloy, the leader of the Decemberists, slams him hard in an interview with Mark Baumgarten of Seattle Weekly. It’s one of those excellent old-fashioned-style music pieces where they sit down with an artist and play them some stuff and get their comments. Meloy has good taste, he likes Robyn Hitchcock. Guess who he doesn’t like?
Meloy: Who is this?
SW: Bright Eyes.
Meloy: I have one record by him that I would have traded in years ago, but I started a new thing before I bought it that I wouldn't sell any more records back. So, I bought one of his records, Fevers & Mirrors. I listened to half of two songs and put it away immediately and haven't listened to it since. His voice and his writing are just so irritating.
SW: Why do you think he's so popular?
Meloy: Because he's really hot. I mean, I think there's definitely something in this that you can relate to, but it is so easy to swallow it and imagine yourself in poor Conor Oberst's shoes. You know, everybody wants to be in that bedroom. But it does seem a little shallow and emotionally and creatively corrupt.
SW: When he played in Portland last month, he came out in a 10-year-old's raincoat, and when he got excited, he clapped like a hand puppet.
Meloy: They call it indie autism, and he's the poster child for it. Seriously, can we stop this?
A very nice diss, all in all: Meloy wouldn’t listen to the album even after he’d paid money for it, he knew the money was gone and didn’t want to throw away his time on top of it. He is precise, “half of two songs,” meaning he hit skip on the first song, gave the album one more chance and then that was it. He wards off the accusation of petty envy by admitting without being pressed that the guy’s attractive to women, which is a much bigger deal to concede.
The interview’s kind of a set-up, though, which I object to. Baumgarten knows Meloy will take the bait and do his hipster dirty work for him while his own hands stay clean. If he is ever introduced to Bright Eyes at a festival somewhere, he can still shake his hand.
Perhaps the benchmark for bad lyrics was set by Bono when he sang: A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle/ when you’re trying to throw your arms around the world. In his defense, he is Irish and may have heard or seen the popular feminist slogan in passing and not realized it was already a worn-out bumpersticker staple. That nadir is at last matched by Bright Eyes when he bursts out with, This is the first day of my life, I’m glad I didn’t die before I met you.
He’s actually better taken on paper, which really says something about his croaky, crying voice. His good lines aren't bad but his bad ones are really terrible. The failures fall mainly into two categories, self-pity and unworldliness. #1: I’m happy just because I found out I am really no one… When everything gets lonely I can be my own best friend…
From “Road to Joy”: I have my drugs, I have my woman/ They keep away my loneliness/ My parents they have their religion/ But sleep in separate houses. Poor baby, too melancholy to rouse himself and give us a rhyme, too self-involved to want to know that divorced parents are adults with their own problems or that the woman he thinks he possesses is a person in her own right. Looks like the fuck-me-I’m-sensitive school has a new prince.
Of course, the cheap self-pity is precisely what appeals to his devotees, as you can see from the shitstorm of angry reader comments following the BBC's pan of the album. The ghoulish perfume of suffering (though not real suffering) draws in the Oprah heads and the therapy casualties, the vultures of pain; it seems to validate their own pseudo-suffering, much like the smiley heartsongs of the terminally ill boy-poet Mattie Stepanek did. In order to protect their own false innocence, they will only take wisdom from an untainted man-child, and the only wisdom they will hear is to remain a child.
#2: From “Landlocked Blues”: We made love on the living room floor/ With the noise in background of a televised war/ And in the deafening pleasure I thought I heard someone say/ “If we walk away, they’ll walk away.” Complaining that war is shown on television is an empty cliché now; is the point supposed to be that it shouldn’t be? In fact, it should be but isn't. To address the current war in Iraq by saying they will walk away if we do makes absolutely no sense. We have invaded and occupied their homeland; where are they going to walk to? It is not a war between equals, like the Cold War was, not a scenario where both sides must stand down.
From “Road to Joy”: So when you’re asked to fight a war that’s over nothing/ It’s best to join the side that’s gonna win/ And no one’s sure how all of this got started/ But we’re gonna make them goddamn certain how it’s gonna end. Of course, it’s not a war over nothing and anyone who reads the newspapers knows how it got started: a terrorist attack, followed by an Anglo-American campaign of official lies and misdirection that is currently unraveling.
Bright Eyes even makes anti-war songs look bad. He does what a lot of soft liberals do, mocks the toughness of the tough by mimicking it with a whoop and a fake We and a hearty goddamn for emphasis. It’s the safest way to criticize; I have done it myself. He is being pretend-cynical when he says join the winning side and later when he says: If you’re still free start running away/ Cause we’re coming for you! But pretend-cynicism is not effective and people adopt it because they know it will not be. They don’t want to draw fire.
When you first put on Sufjan Stevens, nothing seems to be happening; it feels like background music. Many of the songs on his recent album “Illinois” would not be out of place played at the Gap, some even sound like they could have been written there, while folding and restocking. I hear Peanuts and Dave Brubeck; my wife hears Philip Glass and -- ouch -- "Rent." Probably two or three times playing the album I said, This track’s not so bad. Several of the tunes could go on a gentle mix tape for someone who is bereaved or in mourning; they’re soothing like moisturizing bath beads or gift soap.
The aspirations to symphonic composition don’t bother me, nor does the Wallace-Eggers verbosity of the song titles. About a third of the titles, particularly the longer ones, are just brief musical reprises that pass without notice; of the 22 tracks, only 15 or so are actual songs (which is still a lot). I'm not annoyed by the mad Michenerian-Vollmanesque plan he has announced to do an album for each of the fifty states and I don't even mind the faint whiff of Jesus sauce under his minty breath. He seems like a nice young man who would bring your daughter home on time, the kind of Christian I'm happy to live next to.
It's a little harder to respect the fact that he's never even lived in Illinois. When you look up Chicago in the Faker’s Encyclopedia the first thing it says must be that they had a World’s Fair there once. Judging by all the names of towns in the lyrics, Sufjan seems to have gotten his hands on a map or train schedule as well. As he has revealed on stage, some of the childhood events he sings about have been transposed from his own home state of Michigan. Much of "Illinois" reads like the cribbed history book report of a spastic seventh grader, but it’s hardly worth criticizing the words because his half-whispered choir boy singing is so innocuous they barely register. A lyric like “the house we got at Sears” shows he doesn’t take history seriously except as fodder; it’s interesting to know that Sears used to make houses but of course they were ordered from a blueprint in the catalog and then delivered and assembled, you didn’t get them at a store.
The stand-out charmer “Chicago” reworks a catchy melody from the final track on his last album. It has an engaging chorus, “All things go,” arguably trite but true enough to bear repeating, and a nice secondary refrain, “I made a lot of mistakes.” Telling us on Track 11 that “We have a lot to give one another” is maybe taking the earnestness too far. Sufjan’s not a poseur so much as forgiveably a wuss, something I can support in a time when it seems a man has to fight for the right to be weak.
He and Bright Eyes both write very quickly, apparently under the illusion that they are prodigies. They don’t seem to understand that the creative process should involve culling only the best of one’s output and reworking it obsessively until it makes you too sick to even look at.
Both are often classed by the press as leading lights in a new folk movement that includes two albums I would highly recommend to anyone who enjoys the naked sound of acoustic guitar picking, Devendra Banhart's Rejoicing In the Hands and Iron and Wine's The Creek Drank The Cradle. Another interesting new folkster is Joanna Newsom, whose Sarah Vowell-meets-Bjork-in-Middle-Earth harp stylings should appeal to Kate Bush's more out-there fans. The L.A. Times Magazine describes them all as "using a similar tool set—quiet voices, acoustic instruments and a fondness for mystery." They all have odd vocal styles that require a little adjustment on the listener's part before they can be appreciated. Lastly, let me also mention here Six Organs of Admittance, an accomplished guitarist influenced by both traditional Indian music and noise-rock. Three of these four lived in the Bay Area (the exception being Iron and Wine, who teaches film in Tallahassee) so it's kind of an SF scene as well as a folk one.
Why try to put the hurt on anyone? Why say something not nice? Because sometimes you have to. Because the first person to speak is not always right, so the second must bear the burden of seeming disagreeable.
Praise is a kiss that needs a little bite, to prove it’s sincere. There is a place for destructive criticism in our understanding of the arts, a desperate need for it, actually. The aggregate effect of individual cautions is general vacuity. Perhaps routinely brutal and heavy-handed literary critics like Dale Peck and William Logan are right this is no golden age or perhaps they are just foxes crying sour grapes. But in hyped-up times, under a heavy barrage of buddy-buddy blurbing, the harsh and the negative is our best gauge of the true.
In a New Yorker interview Bright Eyes says he “feels spiritual” when reading Garcia Marquez. Basically, he’s a kid. He should be handled with kid gloves, right? Actually, kid gloves are gloves made out of a supple young goat.
So let’s make ourselves some new gloves out of the kid.
Bravissimo!
You could add Ryan Adams to the list of prodigious artists who think they are prodigies. Didn't he and Bright Eyes both release <i>two</i> albums in one year?
First of all, thank you for this roast of Bright Eyes.
I also agree mostly with your take on Illinoise. My enjoyment of Surfjan Stevens is consistently hindered by the fact I struggle to find anything to relate to in his songs, not so much because of the subject matter but because everything does seem disingenuous. I guess thats what happens when you proclaim that you are going to write one album for each of the 50 states.
It also doesn't help that he seems to take every scrap he can from the recording session and throw it onto the a CD. His albums feel very loose and often end up boring because of it.
I second the Iron and Wine recommendation, if only for the fact that he maintains a wicked beard.
Prediction: someone reads this and names their new band “Fondue of Smarm”
I can't help but feel much your music writing comes far too late (and hence reads as mostly irrelevant). These articles (see the “Twin Cinema” and Sleater-Kinney reviews as well) are coming months after the album's initial release and dissemination in the critical community. Debates about Oberst — at least for this set of songs — seemed completely played out before spring came around. If you weren't merely “remixing” the arguments that other critics made months ago, this analysis might be more interesting, but instead it reads like a summary for those who don't follow music criticism. You fail to even mention “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn” — Oberst's “electronic” album released on the same day that deserves an even harsher critique for advertising itself as musically experimental.
Also, your treatment of the “new folk scene” seems an act of poor internet research rather than actual participation. Devendra Banhart's albums were conceived and recorded while living in New York City — a scene with the most innovative “new folk” bands like Animal Collective. By calling this an “SF scene,” you also ignore the work being done in the Pacific Northwest through K records and its subsidiaries. Artists like The Microphones, Mirah and Little Wings have been releasing excellent albums for years. Finally, Bright Eyes and Sufjan Stevens are hardly considered part of this movement in the first place: Oberst heads the Saddle Creek scene in Omaha, while Stevens is usually considered in the context of his Asthmatic Kitty label which includes artists like The Castanets and Daniel Smith.
Ouch. You're right about the timeliness, and the audience — I am writing for people who don't follow music criticism (and why should they?) — and the fact that my knowledge is based mainly on internet research. According to an interview in Free Williamsburg, Banhart moved to NYC in 2002, after his first album, so I guess he isn't part of any SF scene anymore. I don't think Bright Eyes and Sufjan are really part of the same scene as the others I mentioned, but plenty of journalists do. My hope is that writing a little after the review cycle has passed gives me a chance to reflect on journalism as well as music.
Lastly, if you or anyone can tell me where the melody of “Lua” comes from, I'd sleep better at night!
“Ouch. You're right about the timeliness, and the audience — I am writing for people who don't follow music criticism (and why should they?) ”
-- I do have to admit that I responded to this more as a review geared towards readers of a site like Pitchfork, which is to mistake your audience and intentions. My bad.
I feel now that I might have been overly practicing the same brand of destructive criticism you've used in the Oberst analysis and theorized in your final paragraphs. To supply a bit of praise that was left out of my original comments, I very much agree with your own destructive hatred of Oberst's “poor baby” vocals and lyrics. If only everyone would get over him... The Dylan of songs like “Don't Think Twice” (whom Bright Eyes is often compared) would surely cringe at the numerous critics who continue to push this connection.
“You Can't Always Get What You Want” really does seem to be the most apt comparison to “Lua” — pretty funny considering the fourteen year old girls who presumably listen to this song in their beds would never give The Stones' baby boomer music the time of day.
Bright Eyes has never done anything for me, so I'm pleased to see your dis and your reporting of others' disses.
As far as timeliness goes, I'm glad that you're writing about things that folks have stopped talking about so much. I'm sick of the whole Pitchfork “That was last month's artist of the moment” planned obsolescence.
But I do want to put in a word for Sufjan Stevens. I was non-plussed by him at first. It took me a while to like Illinois. Now, though, I've come to relish the experience of listening to it, even though there are still songs that strike me as too fey or precious.
Here's something I wrote about him for Tikkun:
http://cbertsch.livejournal...
The long comments section includes feedback from someone who really doesn't like Stevens.
In Surfjan's defense, his song “Casimir Pulaski Day” has been on my regular rotation lately even though a couple lyrical moments make me cringe.
I'm indifferent to bright eyes, but I like sufjan alot (when I'm in the mood for him at least). I can understand thinking illinoise is a bit too... I dunno, didactic? precious? didactically precious?
But if nothing else, give “seven swans” a listen — especially if you dig iron & wine I think you'd like it. And even the excesses and disingenuities of a record are reflections of the artist — iron & wine definitely has its own excesses and disingenuities (hey look at me, I'm from the 1900's midwest / hey look at me, I revere the woman). I'm not sure it's possible to create music without creating a fake self, since music is supposed to be more exciting than real life.
And I'm also not convinced we need any more negativity than we have — people will like what they like, and there will always be plenty of shitty music no matter what you do. And plenty of good, too.
What really irks me is how people try and say, “Oh, this song sounds just like this song.”
“Lua” is in a completely different key than “You Can't Always Get What You Want.” Maybe if you were REALLY trying to get them to sound alike, you would address the first 2 chords of the song, which, without the capo, would be the same as “You Can't Always Get What You Want.” The chords would be C and F.
Do you know what other songs use that exact same format?
Devendra Banhart's “At The Hop”
Simon and Garfunkel's “Only Living Boy In New York”
And literally THOUSANDS of others. You really have to know a thing or two about songwriting to legitimately say if one song sounds like another, you can't base it off of 2 chords that sound similar. That comparison was very weak.
Really I think this whole argument is ridiculous. I like Devendra Banhart, but I still think his lyrics are really very vanilla when compared to Conor Oberst's.
The only thing you will hear from people who criticize him is “Oh ALL his songs are so pretentious.” Yea, Fevers and Mirrors would fit this description. But the fact is that people who rip on Conor Oberst have heard 95% of his whole catalogue. The man has written HUNDREDS of songs. I haven't even heard them all. I can tell you that a small percentage would fit under the “unbelievably pretentious” category.
Unless you will call anything with the slightest bit of self-examination “pretentious.”
Which you probably would. Since artists really aren't allowed to do that anymore without being slammed. Unless they're Paul McCartney.
I swear to God that if he'd written “Yesterday” within the past few years, EVERYONE would be slagging it and calling it a pretentious emo song.
So, you really need to explore Oberst's whole catalogue before you think you've got him figured out. He has more material already than most artists make their whole careers.
Also, saying that he uses “hackneyed bar band changes” in reference to his country songs.
Let me explain to you that country music is largely based on blues.
Meaning that country music usually has a certain format. Blues chords. If you want to write a traditional-sounding country song, which Oberst does sometimes, then you will most likely use blues chords.
I understand that you don't like Oberst's voice, but please don't write entire articles about how bad he is before you've taken the time to acquaint yourself with songwriting, musical styles, and his history.
Nice takedown!
I've recently become a big Six Organs of Admittance fan (especially the most recent album and For Octavio Paz, which seem a little more sonically interesting that the first couple, but I've never been able to get into Bright Eyes or Stevens, despite the fact that Amazon's recommender software keeps shoving them in my face.
Also, for folks who really like real alternafolk I recommend Michael Hurley.
I don't think in 'landlocked blues' he's really advocating the walk away scenario.
Earlier in the song he says to a kid with a tree branch for a gun 'enough is enough, if you walk away I'll walk away. And he shot me dead'.
And following the lyrics you quote:
'I thought I heard someone say, “If we walk away, they’ll walk away. but greed is a bottomless pit...'
again, doesn't sound like he thinks its gonna work.
I also don't think he's complaining about the fact that the war is being televised - I think that's more to set up the discord between what they are doing (making love) and the death and destruction going on in the world. He's also talking about how we're not really feeling the war - it's just a distant thing, a show on a tv, so much so that we're able to make love w/ it on in the same room.
Er, Meloy is an atrocious lyricist, I mean REALLY PRETENTIOUSLY BAD, about 20% of the time, merely annoying about 15% on top of that. I hate Bright Eyes, but who's got room to talk, Colin? Now, when he does something like Grace Cathedral Hill, that's remarkable. But even that song is like a set piece for him; he's rewritten it, badly, two times already.
I take issue with anyone who says Meloy is more pretentious than Oberst. Meloy is self-aware which makes all the difference, there's an unmistakeable element of tounge-in-cheek irony in the Decemberists. Sure,it's painfully clear that Meloy has spent too mcuh time listening to the Smiths but you would never take Meloy seriously the way you might Dylan, or the way Oberst wants you take him.
Jesus, I feel so out of touch. I don't give a shit about any of these little wankers.
Let's see what Oberst will do if he gets hopped up on speedballs and gets called “Judas” every once in a while.
My bet is that he'll crawl crying home. Of course, Dylan crawled home too, but he wasn't crying and he was on the ground because he supposedly fell off his bike.
But whatever. Insufferably sensitive crap is still bad.
If the dreaded “Wallace-Eggers verbosity” wasn't enough to make you sufficiently hate Sufeeyan, perhaps the fact that he briefly attended the New School MFA program will be. And I hear he's a Christian, so he clearly needs to die.
I can't dig Bright Eyes either, but if his music is a fondue of smarm, your post on him is a veritable cauldron of snarkiness.
The song I was searching for was, ironically, Bob Seger’s “Rock and Roll Never Forgets.” Comparing the two, I wouldn’t say that “Lua” has stolen its melody, but the similarity shows, for me at least, that it’s not original.
I’m glad every quarter has now been heard from, including the 18-year-old Texas boner strangler who saw fit to explain that country is based on blues progressions. While it’s true that many songs use the same chords, some sound fresh and others don’t.
I made a serious mistake in this piece; I defended negative reviewing, saying there was a need for more of it. That may be true in the mainstream press, but it isn’t really true on the web. On the web, the opposite is true; there is always a crying need for civility. I tried to provide a counterbalance here by naming several musicians I do like in the piece.
Personally, I would always rather hear about good music than bad, but that doesn’t mean we should only speak when we have good things to say. The anti-snark campaign was just the in-crowd circling the wagons against criticism itself. You don’t really want to live in a world where reviewers are afraid to hurt artists’ feelings.
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