BLOWIN' INDIE WIND

Author: RICHARD LAWLESS

Bright Eyes, a.k.a. Conor Oberst, is in the middle of a media hurricane as I write this. After a three-year hiatus, he released two albums this January - at the height of the slow album season - and newspapers everywhere are singing his praises, with rumblings of, at long last, the music industry discovering the "next Dylan," as his albums and single topped the Billboard charts. Blasphemy, you say? I couldn't agree with you more.

Naturally I can't hold Oberst responsible for all this speculation; he's just a musician playing the promotions circuit to the height of his advantage. But I can blame him for sucking. Of the two albums he released, most attention is being focused on the folksier of the two, "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning," and that's where I'm going to focus too. The second album, "Digital Ash In a Digital Urn," is a more experimental and electronic affair, and not nearly as much fun to dissect as "I'm Wide Awake," which I view as Oberst's obvious plead to be admitted to the singer/songwriter hall of fame. And while I know many, many people will disagree with me, I'm going to stick by my assertion that "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning" blows.

The album's first song, "At the Bottom of Everything," starts off pretentiously enough, with the sound of Oberst sipping water, or something, then launching into this overly-rehearsed monologue about a woman sitting on a plane. Master storyteller that he is, his speech seems so contrived that even the stumbling and the pauses sound deliberate, much like his unnecessarily awkward description of a magazine article being "arduous." While attempting to come off as a weary-eyed troubadour, Oberst instead comes off as a weird, creepy nervous guy who you feel might lash out at any minute. Following the monologue, Oberst launches into a little ditty with one of the most groan-inducing, predictable chord progressions you've ever heard. It's like that song you wrote when you were eight years old and immediately knew was lame. And he's using that very song right here to kick things off. Pure genius.

The biggest complaint about Oberst, regardless of how much or little you value his lyrics, is that he really can't write good songs. "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning" is perfect proof of this, as Oberst takes you through 10 of the most boring, forgettable melodies you've ever heard, unless you listen to Creed every day. His lyrics, while original, bear the shameful mark of immaturity, which I feel has less and less to do with his youthful age of 25, and more with Oberst just being immature. If we really must compare, at age 25 Dylan had already released "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde On Blonde." Yeah. One of the few okay moments on the album are the pretty guitar twangs that open the album's second song, "We're Nowhere and It's Now." One of the most popular, and oft quoted (already) songs on the album, is the gentle "Lua," which is probably the least terrible song on the album. In "Lua," Oberst sings "I know that it is freezing / But I think we have to walk / I keep waving at taxis / They keep turning their lights off / But Julie knows a party at some actor's West Side loft." His lyrics are better than most, but unfortunately, when I say most, that includes every band ever, including the terrible death-metal band I played in back in high school, so that's not setting the bar too high. But even though the lyrics are manageable, the album is packaged in a trendy hipsterness that is endlessly irritating because it comes across as contrived - it's more focused on image and presentation than content. Conor Oberst is not a folk legend. He's a hipster from Omaha who wishes he was Dylan, but doesn't have the songwriting skills to back his dreams up. It's like he's slapping folk music in the face, and then giggling about it afterwards as he cashes his checks. But honestly, I can't blame Oberst if the media's willing to go along with it. Though people might throw rocks at me for saying so, "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning" is nothing more than the sound of an awkward hipster freaking out to really lame country ditties packaged to win over the collective heart of America. And unfortunately, he did.