T/S - Bright Eyes' Digital Ash in a Digital Urn vs. I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning

brilliant.

"Once the textbook definition of adolescent "emocore," Omaha singer/songwriter Conor Oberst redefines himself with two new albums"

can i get a wtf?

emocore? when and how? emocore is way more aggro than bright eyes could ever hope to be. i'm no BE fan, and i don't come to kick him in the teeth here.... what the fuck is pitchfork doing? i try not to wreck on the fork... but damn... can we fuck up the "emo" tag any more? a whole new batch of dudes are gonna start calling BE emocore and totally fuck up the diction. "pitchfork says..." as if it wasn't already fucked.

sorry for the OT.
m.

Listen to his first band, Commander Venus, or Desperadecios. I think that's what Ryan meant more than Fevers & Mirrors.

After Desperadecios and adopting the Bright Eyes name is when Conor Oberst "redefined" himself. Yes, these two new albums are different from his past Bright Eyes releases, but they are definitely not part of his redefinition from "emocore" to whatever he may be now.

Even if you do want to claim it to be technically correct, that is definitely a misleading statement.

i dunno. i didn't care for BE back in the day and so never bothered to check out just about any related projects whatsoever, so perhaps my madness came from nowhere... but as far as i know, BE has been a sweater totin' "emo" band since the later nineties... not a hardcore emo or an emocore band... more in common with indie rock than hardcore.

ah, who fuckin cares? the kids don't get it right. i don't get it right. why should pitchfork either?
m.

i think most of the communication difficulty over emo is that a bunch of kids who started to suddenly play indie rock didn't want to be called indie rock, so they called it emo to avoid having to come to terms with how their tastes had mellowed into the tastes of their older siblings... "this is punk man!!"
m.

My dad thinks 'I'm Wide Awake' is a piece of shit but loves the other one.

Generally, I have no interest in 'songwriters' and the thought of some intensely emotional young guy strumming a guitar and singing deeply personal, honest songs would have made me switch off a year ago, but I was exposed to a lot of Bright Eyes and, although I didn't (don't) like all of it, I was taken with the diamond-hard conviction, intensity, and honesty I heard in the lyrics. Having listened to a fair bit and seen him play live (twice; the second time brilliantly) I don't think he's slyly manipulating the hordes of fragile teenagers that adore him, and he'd have to be incredibly cynical to do that, and I don't really detect any cynicism at all. Someone said in that thread about his performance on some american talk show that he wreaked of "moooom, get out of my room!", but that seems way off. What really moves me when listening to Bright Eyes is Oberst's desire for redemption through love, which has grown in the last couple of releases into a sort of bold humanism and he now seems more bothered about everyone else. His scope has broadened so much that the typical criticisms you might level at more heart-on-sleeve emo stuff (like the one above) seem irrelevant. His politics appear horribly simplistic in places and there are plenty of unremarkable songs, embarassing bits etc as there are with a lot of artists, -but overall, the boldness, humanism and warmth in his music seems so touching and overwhelmingly GOOD that I don't doubt his integrity or world-view at all, and any of his more annoying trappings don't bother me. And it's so rare to find an artist with that conviction and integrity that it seems, well, a bit off to dismiss him so casually as if his whole intentions are obviously so incredibly off-base. But I tend to think it comes from not wanting to feel embarassed by such upfront emotion, however worthwhile it is. I appreciate there are things about Bright Eyes people might not like (his voice say), but that doesn't account for the contempt he seems to be held in.

And I pick "I'm Wide Awake It's Morning", which is pretty patchy, but the opener, "At The Bottom Of Everything" affected me more than anything else released for a while.

I could probably cut one of those middle ones, but I think this makes a pretty great EP.

Songs I've kept from Wide Awake, It's Morning:

I think its a matter of whether you think Conor Oberst's voice should be the sole musical focus of an album. Personally I need some bombast to give that warble context.

Wide Awake is a perfectly lovely album that is chock full of good stuff. There really isn't a boring track on it, and some of the stuff is flat-out gorgeous. Nothing on it is innovative, or mind-bending, or anything like that, but it is a fully realized bunch of songs by a consistently interesting artist (with an annoying voice, just like you-know-who).

Digital Ash is pretty good, too. Miccio's EP is essentially the one I listen to as well.

So Wide Awake, definitely.