Conor Oberst and company have not lost their taste for grandiosity on their first album in nearly a decade, setting familiar woes against a dazzling collage of sounds.
This—[gestures broadly]—is happening, and Conor Oberst is singing over a “Hotline Bling”-type beat. The uncanny moment occurs almost halfway through Bright Eyes’ 10th album, Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was. “The world went down in flames and man-made caves,” the beloved Omaha bandleader sings on “Pan and Broom,” backed by the sort of rudimentary drum-machine clicks that powered Drake’s world-conquering 2015 smash. Though the musical setting is contemporary, the message is familiar for Bright Eyes, with lyrics that are as personal as they are apocalyptic. In between a push down the stairs and a flight to Tulum, Oberst’s narrator uses the titular pan and broom to sweep up his dreams.
Since rising up out of the flat and corny Midwest in 1995 like a quivery-voiced derecho storm, Bright Eyes have never shied away from the maudlin, a tendency that once caused non-teenagers to look down their noses. In recent years, as Oberst has focused on solo projects and other collaborations, the band’s cultural status has solidified: Post Malone interpolated them for Young Thug, Mac Miller covered them, Lil Peep sampled them. Oberst is now bandmates with Phoebe Bridgers, in their open-hearted folk-rock duo Better Oblivion Community Center. And the 1975’s Matt Healy, for one, endorses those scare-quoted mid-’00s “new Dylan” comparisons. Bright Eyes have belatedly found critical acceptance as a kind of musical rite of passage for smart, sensitive youths. That’s not faint praise, but it still seems to sell them short as their first wave of fans age into their 30s and 40s.
The emotional outpourings of a wunderkind are easy to dismiss as raw passion. With Down in the Weeds, the painstaking craft of Oberst and the other two longtime Bright Eyes members—producer Mike Mogis and multi-instrumentalist Nate Walcott—is on vivid display. As related in innumerable quarantine interviews, the band deliberately ransacked disparate aspects from their back-catalog: lush orchestral pop, twangy Americana, warped electronic textures, blown-out distortion, tremulous whispers-to-a-scream. Flea plays slap bass on several tracks and never raises an eyebrow. Rather than try to recapture lost youth, as their tour through past sounds might imply, the group glories in incipient middle age. Oberst, who has recently gone through a divorce and the death of his brother, brings that perspective to his ornate but piercing lyrics. You can scream along to Down in the Weeds, but also quietly appreciate it—a testament to the artistry that went into this Bright Eyes album and all the others from which it draws.
Almost every song here shoves interpersonal woes against societal angst in a fundamentally Bright Eyes way. On the bizarro wedding-dance swooner “One and Done,” before pointing at “the masochists all celebrating love,” Oberst mentions “the final field recording from the loud Anthropocene,” and that lofty sense of doom suffuses the record. Standout “To Death’s Heart (In Three Parts)” links visceral introspection (Oberst asks, “What’s it like to live with me here/Every fucking day?”) with the tragic 2015 attacks on the Bataclan in Paris and, as if moving by dream logic, Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.” “All these same fears/Year after year,” Oberst sings, paraphrasing the classic-rock standard. It’s an apt mission statement for Bright Eyes’ return: Age hasn’t dimmed the relevance of their existential anxieties. Or, as Oberst told an interviewer, “I take no joy in being right about all of this stuff.”
The specters of Oberst’s ex-wife and late brother hang over the proceedings. The first voice on the album is the Spanish-language, spoken-word lilt of Corina Figueroa Escamilla, who still shares two dogs with Oberst, on a ragtime- and mushrooms-inspired opener that establishes the audacious, très-Bright-Eyes scope of the record. The folk-rock romp “Tilt-A-Whirl” begins with Oberst singing, “My phantom brother came to me.” A queasy Marxophone interlude can’t lighten the misery: “Life’s a solitary song,” the lifelong singer sings, “no one to clap or sing along.” On another highlight, the melancholic “Stairwell Song,” Oberst constructs a specific-yet-ambiguous story that could address either lost partner, or neither. He concludes with a wink, howling “You like cinematic endings” as a triumphant swell of horns and strings cues the credits.
Not all of the satisfactions of Down in the Weeds are so baroque. Joined by a gospel choir on the comparatively buoyant “Forced Convalescence,” Oberst is hilarious as he sings about “catastrophizing” his 40th birthday, and the inability to escape from “housework, or the bank clerk, or the priest.” On the piano ballad “Hot Car in the Sun,” Oberst might be “dreaming of my ex-wife’s face,” or having sad visions of overheating dogs, but in the real world he’s just chopping celery for soup: “Didn’t have much else to do,” he confides. On the wide-screen finale, “Comet Song,” he sets out a household scene that’s uncomfortably easy to picture: “You clenched your fist/You threw the dish/And called me Peter Pan/Your aim’s not very accurate.” The whole of this album is more than the sum of the parts, but the parts can still be devastating.
But Down in the Weeds falters when it loses touch with its essential grandiosity, in a handful of songs that feel more like standalones than threads in a tapestry. “Dance and Sing,” a jaunty and well-earned call for love and endurance, is more easily digestible than many songs here, but also less dazzling. The most conventional pick among the pre-release singles, the slick stadium-rocker “Mariana Trench,” also works well enough, its lyrical purview spanning from Mt. Everest to “your other brother’s grave,” but doesn’t reach into the next level of detail that raises goosebumps elsewhere.
Down in the Weeds, recorded before the global pandemic, suits the daily desolation of lockdown. It also makes me regret that Oberst can’t perform these songs live, where young fans and old could form bonds as lasting with them as with Bright Eyes’ past staples. On “Nothing Gets Crossed Out,” a confessional from the 2002 classic Lifted, Oberst worried aloud about the future, singing, “I’m just too afraid of all this change.” Down in the Weeds begins with the vow, “Got to change like your life is depending on it,” and peaks about the point where Oberst looks back on his psychic aches and stutters, “All that’s constant is that change.” Running over the same old ground, Bright Eyes have found the same old fears. Wish they were here.
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