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Conor Oberst, the 2000’s favorite indie/Americana/folk-rock poster boy, has returned as Bright Eyes, following a four-year hiatus. Oberst unleashed his tenth studio album The People’s Key last Tuesday.
The album is a delectable blend of synth keyboards, electric guitars and poppy beats, all while being periodically narrated by a mysterious, philosophical baritone concerning the meaning of the universe.
Leave it to Bright Eyes (whose last album cover was only visible with a decoding lens) to begin a record with a three-minute rant on the origins of the human race.
Released on his 31st birthday, The People’s Key represents why Oberst is a mastermind as he allows the transcendental narrator, friend and frontman of Refried Ice Cream Denny Brewer, to get more than a little philosophical.
Oberst himself moans in “Jejune Stars,” “Come fire, come water, come Karma, we’re all in transition/The Wheel of Becoming erases the physical mind.”
This may seem to offer more questions than answers for many listeners, though it is all tethered back down to reality by pleasantly accessible and incessantly catchy pop-synth segments taking a page right out of 2005’s A Digital Ash In A Digital Urn.
The record offers a glimpse of the traditionally emotional and poetic Oberst in the penultimate “ladder song” where Oberst gets quickly and wonderfully re-aquianted with his piano and belts in his slightly off-key drone, “You’re not alone in anything, you’re not unique in dying.”
Other than the just mentioned snap shot of folk, the remaining nine songs on the just-over 45-minute disk sound like they could be a mash-up between an unreleased Weezer album and Oberst’s poetry book, which, surprisingly, works.
The beautifully pop-rocky “Triple Spiral” gives ardent Bright Eye’s fans exactly what they want, a classic emotionally confused yet somehow seemingly knowledgeable Oberst, accompanied by a very polished up version of the electric pop attempted at times but not mastered on previous albums.
Although fans have had to wait for Oberst to galavant around for four years with acts such as The Monsters of Folk and Conor Oberst and The Mystic Valley Band, Oberst has finally given the world what is wanted all along, a new Bright Eyes album.
