AMG vs. Bright Eyes

Stephen Thomas Erlewine really, really doesn't like the new Bright Eyes albums. To the tune of 1255 words, in fact. By contrast, the new Low album gets 363 words, the new Chemical Brothers gets 325, and even Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, one of the most talked about double albums of the half-finished decade, only merited 748.

I certainly agree with some of his points. Though he doesn't out and out decry 'emo', he does complain about music that is "judged solely on whether it's a personal emotional expression or not, never taking into account such niceties as craft, in either music or lyrics, or in the sheer impact of the music."

Also:

Its directness reveals that the emperor has no clothes. Stripped of the careening, dramatic, meandering arrangements of Lifted, Oberst's music seems not simpler, but simplistic, the plodding music acting as a bed for monochromatic melodies that merely serve as a delivery mechanism for all those words he's poured out on the page....

Oberst is as precious as Paul Simon, but without any sense of rhyme or meter or gift for imagery, puking out lines filled with cheap metaphors and clumsy words that don't scan. Supporters excuse this as soul-searching, but the heavy-handed pretension in the words and the affectedness in his delivery... give the whole enterprise a sense of phoniness that's only enhanced by its unadorned production.

Much of this rings true for me, at least some of the time, on Bright Eyes songs I've heard both in concert and on record. When the raw emotion works for me, it's because of the specific sentiments he's expressing, and not the way he chooses to express them.

However, I tend to listen more for the sound of the music than the lyrics in most cases, and for that reason some Bright Eyes songs that other people like (I assume because of the emotion/themes/etc.) I don't find very listenable.

Don't chalk up its weakness to youth, either, or suggest that he'll get better with age. Paul McCartney was 22 at the height of Beatlemania. At the age of 23, Dylan made Bringing It All Back Home, Neil Young released Everybody Knows This is Nowhere and Jackson Browne cut his debut. Kurt Cobain was 24 when Nirvana recorded Nevermind, the same age Conor Oberst was when he released the pair of albums that prove without a shadow of a doubt that instead of reaching musical maturity, he's wallowing in a perpetual adolescence.

The ending seems particularly bitter and harsh, but not entirely unwarranted. I think Rolling Stone or Spin or something had a heading on the cover last week like "Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst: Best Songwriter of His Generation?!!!!!!" That struck me a sensationalist probably nowhere near accurate, but I'm sure it's those kinds of wild overstatements that provoke such a backlash.

Incidentally, Fog (especially live) strikes me in the same way as Bright Eyes. They're both celebrated, at least by some, but their experimentation sometimes seems more like laziness and contempt for traditional song structure than anything positive. If I thought about it long enough, I could come up with a long list of artists like this, but it would probably be offensive.

I suppose I will probably have to listen to I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning first, before passing any final judgements.