The Traveling Wilbury
The last time Conor Oberst made a solo record, 12 years ago, it was a solo cassette; Oberst a 16-year-old enfant terrible turning out home-recorded cuts riddled with adolescent angst. In his first solo record since the puberty years of the mid-'90s, Oberst has entered a musical middle-age. Tired, flaccid, cashed-up, and awash in the hot licks of session-musicians, it's not the work of some enraged, insular teen; nor, indeed, the work of an incredibly talented songsmith who's earned more than a few Dylan comparisons in his year. Rather, it's the work of a rich jerk, sloughing off responsibilities and indulging in an artistic laziness.
The alarm-bells start ringing from the simple fact that, after 12 years and seven increasingly-successful albums as Bright Eyes, Oberst has decided to re-embrace his birth-name. Whilst, in an ideal world, this new ‘solo’ work would've found the songsmith stripping away the bloated arrangements of recent BE LP's in search of the lonesome balladeer within, this, sadly, isn't the case. Instead, Oberst has ditched his now-famous handle just to shrug off responsibilities.
A new Bright Eyes LP would have to meet expectations, would have to measure up to a back-catalogue whose fearsome highs (Fevers and Mirrors, Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground) still stand tall. A solo record, released on a new label, can be something else entirely. In this case: utterly throwaway.
Death is My Sleazy Pay
In spite of some typically nimble lyricism, Conor Oberst is a toothless set of countrified, coked-sounding jams, bust out by a group of friends hanging out, making music minus urgency and passion. Recorded in a secluded villa in the Mexican mountains, it's an album made on holiday; one relaxed to the point of languour, one reveling in a state of sustained, sunbaked torpor, one reveling in the simple pleasures of shirking regular responsibilities.
Freed from the weight of expectation, Oberst loses the wilful politicking of his rock-n-roll dayjob. Impassioned projection is substituted for getting-on introspection. Specifically, the main recurring lyrical thread is a rumination on the inevitability and imminence of death.
Yet, when coupled with the album's balding, classic-rock recording palette, this gives off less the feeling of, say, headlong teen nihilism, and more the misplaced sensation of listening to the bloated nostalgia of a contented, superannuated septuagenarian, swollen proud by a lifetime’s accomplishments. The starving artist has become bloated success; the self-flagellation that once defined him lost to a smug, self-important self-satisfaction. In short: this Conor Oberst sounds like Ryan Adams.
Record Label: Merge
Release Date: 5 August 2008
