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Bright Eyes I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning Released in 2005 9.3/10 Styles Country Folk Song Highlights Train Underwater Land Locked Blues Poison Oak |
After 2002's Lifted, or, The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, Bright Eyes decided to simultaneously release two albums as the followup - the electronic experiment Digital Ash in a Digital Urn and this album, a twangy folk/country release. After the bloated angst and unorthodox production touches of Lifted..., it's a nice change to see Conor Oberst keeping himself more grounded (attempting to surpass such a wildly ambitious effort is the sort of thing which rarely works out). As such, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning feels extremely relaxed and confident, light on the theatrics while still being of a high quality overall. With the relaxed tone of the music comes a more relaxed and matured Conor Oberst, and it really feels as though he's grown up in between albums. Gone are the self-concsiously emotional lyrics that were an occasional weakpoint, replaced by a more comfortable, (dare I say) cheerful frontman who feels a lot more at ease with himself. Some of us may enjoy hearing Oberst scream about his "absent gods," amid earth-shattering crescendos and so forth, but for those who'd prefer things a little more low-key, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning might just convert them to a Bright Eyes fan. Virtually nothing here comes close to being emo, which in the context of a Bright Eyes release, really is a breath of fresh air. Like Lifted..., the album opens with a spoken word introduction, only this time Oberst has got it right and kept things brief and interesting, and his plane-crash anecdote plays nicely into the country-pop opener "The Bottom of Everything." A sizeable portion of the album follows suit with more of the same feelgood optimistic tone, and even when Oberst lays out the more "down" tracks, such as "Lua" and "Land Locked Blues," there's a significant air of quiet sincerity which makes them entierly enjoyable. Oberst also seems to have taken a more detached, impersonal approach to his lyrics this time around - even when they're stories told in the first person, it feels more like an anecdote than a diary entry. All this means is that very little on I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning feels like it's strugling under the weight of its own self-importance, something which occasionally marred Oberst's previous efforts. Given its lack of ambition, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning is a slightly less accomplished album that its epic predecessor. Being a total departure from the Bright Eyes formula, however, it manages to be a complete success on its own terms. |