newcritics

This is the time of year when I get caught up on records I missed and my old new record of the moment is Bright Eyes‘ Cassadaga, released this past spring.

This is an enchanted record. A confessional, grandiose, oratorical, piece of Americana that mixes the pretentious and the personal in the grand, Whitmanesque tradition. It’s full of fiddle hooks, great choruses, and romance in the old school sense.

It’s a record about spiritual renewal named after a century old camp of psychics in central Florida to which our hero has limped after a doomed affair with an older woman (”She said I kissed her different/That all the men her age are mean”) ends with an abortion (”Since the operation I heard you’re breathing just for one”) and a stint in rehab (Cleanse Song).

Well I went back by rented Cadillac and company jet
Like a newly orphaned refugee retracing my steps
All the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead
They said, “You’d better look alive”
And I was off to old Dakota where a genocide sleeps
In the Black Hills, the Badlands, the calloused East
I buried my ballast. I made my peace.
Heard Four Winds, leveling the pines

The record alternates between rockers that wheel and lurch on their way to soaring choruses, apparently the work of bass player/guitarist Mike Mogis (think: Rolling Thunder Review) and chamber folk songs intricately orchestrated with woodwinds and percussion by pianist Nate Walcott (think: Five Leaves Left).

But the album’s best music comes from the tumbling overflow of words that pour out of singer-songwriter Conor Oberst’s mouth. Like early Springsteen, classic Bob Dylan, or hell, ol’ Walt himself, Oberst harnesses words for their flow as much as for their meanings, a flow which Oberst achieves through internal rhyme and layers with vivid images:

I keep looking for that blindfold faith
lighting candles to a cynical saint
who wants the last laugh at the fly trapped in the windowsill tape

or, later, in Classic Cars:

I made a new cast of the death mask that’s gonna cover my face

Great lines linger in the mind as much as great hooks do (”the whole world loves you if you’re a chic chameleon,” “I felt nauseous with the truth,” “never trust a heart so bent it can’t break”), but there are hooks a plenty (Cleanse Song is as irresistible as Donovan’s There Is a Mountain), and nice melodies too for a folk rock album.

I’m told this is the most polished album of Conor Oberst’s career. It’s a career I haven’t followed. But that’s not unusual, I usually don’t pick up precocious indie rockers until they cast off the lo-fi and make a higher-fi, more mainstream move. Maybe it sounds like selling out to some, but it sounds like buying in to me. At least, I’m buy in. Great album.

(Cross posted at Trickster!)