Indie Rock's Dark Prince

By Josh Tyrangiel

Conor Oberst has amassed such a prodigious discography of pessimism that he has supplanted Sylvia Plath as the go-to source for art that will make you want to open a vein. The sheer volume and relentlessness of Oberst's agony (at 24, he has made nine albums fronting four bands--most famously Bright Eyes, a rotating group of musically inclined depressives), combined with his puppy-dog gaze and lock of drooping-raven hair, give him an inescapable aura of adolescent wallowing. He looks the way a My So-Called Life script sounds.

The choice with Oberst is fairly simple: laugh at him or cry with him. Laughter is certainly the path of least resistance, especially when confronted with the two hulking new Bright Eyes albums--I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn--released simultaneously on Jan. 25. Over the course of 22 tracks, there is exactly one attempt at relative lightness--"I always get lost when I leave the Village/ So I couldn't come meet you in Brooklyn last night" (well, I chuckled)--and Oberst whispers it lest anyone notice. His emotional palette can be an oppressive little thing, and if you listen to him in the wrong mood--say, mordant, as opposed to deeply depressed--you will find him intolerable. But if you happen to be feeling low, or just want to be, no one can make gloom more rapturous.

The stronger of the new records is Wide Awake, which is mostly acoustic songs sung in Oberst's quivering man-child breaths. On his previous albums, Oberst reached impatiently for any instrument lying around the studio (one track opened with him asking, "Can I get a goddamn timpani roll?"). Here he picks his sounds carefully to offset the intensity of his voice and material. On the rousing opener, At the Bottom of Everything, a mandolin clips jauntily away while he crows, "We must blend into the choir, sing as static with the whole/ We must memorize nine numbers and deny we have a soul." These are smart lines, however grim, and with Jesse Harris (Norah Jones' songwriting shoulder) adding wonderfully warm guitar, the song is even hummable. On other tracks, Oberst imports pedal steel and Emmylou Harris (the vocal equivalent of pedal steel) to add a harmonic steadiness that keeps you from wanting to jump off a bridge.

This kind of balance makes the moments when Oberst gets truly miserable much more compelling. Landlocked Blues starts out chronicling a bad relationship and over the course of six riveting minutes meanders into an antiwar ballad. It is easily the best song written against the war in Iraq, as well as one of the better ones about a decomposing affair. Oberst tops himself with Lua, in which he sings about a lost girl in ways that are not particularly dramatic, just perfectly descriptive.

Oberst doesn't lend himself well to sound bites, however. Both of the aforementioned songs are nearly 500 words long, and like Dylan tunes, they sprawl and ramble and seem to rhyme (but don't) in lots of strange places. Their effects build over time, which makes quoting individual lyrics from them a little beside the point--though if forced, I would choose these lines from Landlocked Blues: "The future hangs over our heads, and it moves with each current event/ Until it falls all around like a cold steady rain, just stay in when it's looking this way." But print doesn't really do them justice. Give these songs a chance, and in your darker moments they will be friends for life.

If Wide Awake is an example of the circumstances in which Oberst can be great, Digital Ash proves how fleeting those circumstances are. The lyrics on Digital Ash remain models of thoughtful despair, but the acoustic warmth is replaced by a series of unremarkable synthetic burps and tinny keyboard riffs. One track sounds dangerously similar to Nena's 99 Luftballons. Digital Ash rocks harder but feels emptier.

Still, there's little doubt that in his small way, Oberst is a big talent. Major labels have been desperate to sign him, though Oberst (who founded his own label, Saddle Creek) has resisted on the quite correct grounds that they would force him to stick to writing heartbreaking love songs (preferably ones that could be sold for romantic-comedy sound tracks). Oberst deserves some credit for clinging to his idealism. He deserves even more for making sure his new albums are sold separately.