Bright Eyes - The People's Key (Album)

The four years since the release of the last Bright Eyes album Cassadaga have found Conor Oberst in a curious sort of critical limbo. For a number of reasons (the most frequently cited one being its propensity to the overblown), Cassadaga proved to be one of the most poorly-received albums of Oberst’s career. For what it’s worth, the criticisms weren’t entirely fair, because, firstly, it contained some of Conor’s best songs in ‘Hot Knives’, ‘Lime Tree’ and ‘Cleanse Song’, and, secondly, it’s hardly as if Digital Ash in a Digital Urn and I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning were particularly low-fi recordings, and history seems to have been kind enough to them.

Ever since Cassadaga, though, every release to which Oberst’s name has been tagged has been greeted warily, almost to the point of apprehension. Sure, there were the odd isolated pockets of praise for the two Mystic Valley Band records and Monsters of Folk album, but utimately neither set critics a-quivering with anything even approaching the fervour inspired by Fevers and Mirrors or Lifted. Again, the less than enthusiastic reception of these records felt harsh, but that’s a debate which we will have to set aside for another day lest we find ourselves two thousand words deep without even broaching the subject at hand. One fact has become plain from all this prevaricating though, and it is that since 2007, any album recorded by Conor Oberst is more likely to inspire trepidation than unequivocal excitement.

Well, there’s a very strong chance that The People’s Key will be remembered as the point when the wind changed again, and suspicion ceased to be a feature of a Conor Oberst pre-release campaign. To put it succinctly, it is a brilliant album. And, crucially, a large part of its brilliance stems from the fact that it is completely unlike any previous Bright Eyes album. There’s no cynical attempt to rehash past glories and there is no experimenting aimlessly for experimenting aimlessly’s sake. All we have here is the sound of Oberst, Mogis, Walcott and co sounding completely fresh, pushing Bright Eyes forward into a new space, with inspired results.

Conor has recently spoken about how he went into the studio to record The People’s Key armed only with the lyrics, preferring to allow the instrumentation develop organically during the recording process with Mike and Nate. This spontaneity has resulted in an album which is bristling with vitality, and which, in an entirely different way to Cassadaga, boasts a luxuriously full-sounding cast of instrumentation. The songs are adorned with any number of new and unexpected little flourishes, like the rattle and clamour that heralds the beginning of ‘Jejune Stars’, the strange chugging guitar sound which carries ‘Haile Selassie’ along or the stuttering halt which concludes ‘A Machine Spiritual’, all of which combine to make The People’s Key a living, breathing thing. Oberst has been at pains to suggest that it is a ‘rocking’ album, and there’s no denying that it is, but it’s also utterly beyond the constraints that are implied by that description; it is forward-thinking and progressive too.

There are some things about The People’s Key, though, that are comfortingly familiar. For starters, it wouldn’t feel like a proper Bright Eyes album without a meandering spoken word intro, supplied this time by Refried Ice Cream’s Denny Brewer, who reappears on a few more occasions throughout the record to provide a dignified gravitas akin to the last Gil Scott-Heron album. At first it’s difficult to reconcile his grizzled, vaguely existential monologues to a Bright Eyes recording, but the more the album sinks in, the more integral they begin to feel to the whole tapestry. When you detach yourself from the engulfing embrace of the record (easier said than done, by the way), the resigned philosophy of Brewer’s contributions is actually a perfectly logical counterpart to Oberst’s ruminations on humanity and the universe at large, which are becoming increasingly outward-looking as he gets older.

As the album reaches it’s conclusion, we see two more flashes of ‘old’ Bright Eyes, the first being the aching piano-led ‘The Ladder Song’, which is as beautiful as any of Oberst’s greatest ballads. Aside from showing that he can still gently crush you with the sadness of his voice, ‘The Ladder Song’ also provides encouragement that even in the midst of the swollen sea of instrumentation, he still knows when to keep things minimal. The other glimpse of the Bright Eyes of bygone years comes in the form of the meditative closing song ‘One For You, One For Me’, which bobs along gently, in the process discreetly creating the same sense of low-key stateliness which made Lifted such a stunning album.

The final word on The People’s Key is left to Brewer, allowing him to sign off what he started with a neat symmetry, as he leaves us with a sermon on the importance of forgiveness, mercy and the importance of moving on. Whether the finality of his words will prove to a prophetic final chapter in the Bright Eyes story is, for now unclear, because Conor is about as reliable as James Murphy when it comes to giving definitive answers on the future of his band (and long may he keep us guessing). Either way, The People’s Key is fit to stand toe to toe with any record that will be released in 2011, and serves as a timely reminder of the distinction between form and class.