Bright Eyes – I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning / Digital Ash In A Digital Urn

By now, you’ve probably made up your mind about Conor Oberst. The latest in a long line of so-called New Dylans stretching back to Steve Forbert, Oberst is either the voice of a generation or precisely the sort of wan, perpetually morose singer-songwriter beloved mostly by rock critics and college students.

Oberst’s latest makes a good case for both. A 24-year-old Nebraska native (Bright Eyes is his nom de mope) with several critically acclaimed indie albums to his credit, most notably 2002’s Lifted…Or The Story Is In The Soil Keep Your Ear To The Ground (if all of Bright Eyes’ album titles sound vaguely Scriptural, it probably isn’t an accident), Oberst has divided his latest work into two separately-sold discs, the electronic Digital Ash In A Digital Urn and the acoustic I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning.

Neither is as ambitious as their splashy dual release would suggest. Both are fairly conventional in construction and sound, and both traffic in familiar themes — love, alienation, war — exquisitely wrought. Oberst, whose quavery voice falls somewhere between Paul Westerberg and Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba, without the warmth of the former or the forcefulness of the latter, is a fulsomely gifted songwriter both infinitely relatable and not particularly likable. No small trick.

Morning, the more visceral of the two albums, uses acoustic guitars, mandolins and the occasional trumpet to make its point. Populated with weighty, wordy love songs, the disc is teeth-grindingly sincere and really depressing, full of the sort of stylized garment rending that’s Oberst’s stock in trade.

“The sound of loneliness makes me happier,” he sings on “Poison Oak”, and he’s not kidding. The stripped-down “Lua” is perhaps the best of the two discs’ many love songs, and contains the best couplet: “I know you have a heavy heart, I can feel it when we kiss/So many men much stronger than me have thrown their backs out trying to lift it”. “Landlocked Blues” (if all of Bright Eyes’ song titles sound vaguely Dylanesque, that probably isn’t an accident, either) is one of several memorable anti-war songs, though like most great protest tracks, it could just as easily be about something else.

Emmylou Harris, who has lately become the kind of guest star capable of conveying a shorthand sense of old-school cool simply by showing up, lightens the proceedings only slightly. The album’s very spareness, its calculated simplicity, is meant to suggest weightiness, gravity.

Its companion, the ostensibly more modern Urn, is tarted up with everything from tape loops to theremins. While equally amazing lyrically, it’s in every other way the weaker of the two. Instead of a seamless melding of lyrics and loops, many of the tracks here are clunky and awkward, with indistinct beats grafted onto lyrics too grim — or too floaty — to support them. It isn’t awful, just bizarre (or maybe not: “If it seems like an accident, a collage of senselessness, you aren’t looking hard enough,” warns Oberst on “I Believe In Symmetry”). If Morning is a terrific mix of songwriter and medium, Urn is a shotgun wedding.