Bright Eyes – Five Dice, All Threes
★★★★
Released September 20th, 2024 on Dead Oceans Records
There are, as usual, ominous signs coming from the Bright Eyes camp. Conor Oberst has always battled mental illness, typically through the ill-advised route of substance abuse. Oberst being wasted to the point of incoherence is nothing new – this is stuff he’s been doing for as long as he’s been known outside of Omaha. The problem is that he is now 44 and this is the scene he’s presenting:
As someone I read elsewhere put it: Once you lock in on this level of alcoholism at this age there’s no turning it around. You either get sober or you die.
Heavy stuff, but Bright Eyes have always traded in heavy stuff. When I first heard the group, back in 2001, I was struck at how carefully Oberst walked the line between catharsis and mental illness on songs like “The Calendar Hung Itself.” His lyrics have always had a certain fatalistic relationship with substance abuse and death – I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning was basically a treatise on figuring out that everyone else is doing the same. Things are worse now, though. In a sense, I suppose it was always inevitable that he would, as he put it, fall like a girl from the balance beam. In the wake of performances like the one captured in the tweet above, the record release shows have been cancelled. The reason given is that Oberst “has lost his voice.” Hang around music long enough and you’ll know what that means.
It’s a shame, because Five Dice, All Threes is the best stuff Bright Eyes have done as a group since the aforementioned I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning. Their two post-Wide Awake records were snorefests for the most part – too light, too rambling, not enough of the kind of substance that gave previous Bright Eyes records actual heft. 2020’s Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was (don’t call it a comeback, but…) was a return to form, but Five Dice supersedes it by dint of embracing chaos. The recordings are loose, much more like the sort of stuff they did when they were recording in Oberst’s parent’s basement over two decades ago. Sometimes there’s a ramshackle folk-punk propulsion to the songs, and at others there’s the kind of piano-and-guitar confessionals that first got second wave emo kids into him in the first place. The band has said that they learned to ‘let go’ and ’embrace first takes’ and that’s the sound that’s immediately apparent on the record: sometimes messy, sometimes cool and jazzy, always moving on to something new.
It’s also very clear that Oberst, never the most cheerful of people, has dived down into a real depression, just based on the lyrics. Check out “Hate”, where he says “I hate the protest singer staring at me in the mirror / There’s nothing left worth fighting for hasn’t that come clear / The artificial poets from the future are here.” He writes about not putting your trust in flashy things – don’t bet on the Mets is good advice any day of the week – and running out of time because you thought you’d always be able to just things moving forward – “Tried to tip my way into heaven’s gate / Must have lost a fortune along the way / I never saved up for a rainy day / I put it all on the brass collection plate.” The heaven’s gate bit may also be a nod to the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult from the Nineties. Suicide is, uncomfortably, a running topic on the album. On “The Time I Have Left” – which also features the Dean of Divorced Dad Rock, Matt Berninger – Oberst says “Water keeps running / Asleep in the bathtub / All of these bad dreams / They’re coming to get me.” There is the totality of “Tiny Suicides”, of course, but also consider “Bas Jan Ader”, wherein Oberst discusses the nerve and bravery of the titular figure, a Dutch performance artist who disappeared sailing across the Atlantic Ocean.
It feels a little Purple Mountains, is all I’m saying. I hope Oberst gets well. I hope he gets the help he needs. He is maybe the finest folk poet of my generation and it would be crushing to lose him. Especially now that the band has gotten their groove back and are onto something.
