Turn Around, Bright Eyes

Check out "Bright Eyes" (the group, not the song) at their MySpace page:http://www.myspace.com/brighteyesAnd for a review of the new album from Daily OM Music, see below.April 24, 2007CassadagaBright Eyes 2007"Since the late 1990s, Nebraska-born Conor Oberst has been releasing music under the banner of Bright Eyes, a loose, ever-shifting collective of players centered around the youthful, prodigiously talented singer-songwriter. Oberst's musical vision is expansive and wildly generous, bursting with ideas, characters, images, melodies, and unmitigated passion. The agreeable clatter Oberst produces in realizing his songs seems due to his ceaseless forward motion. It's almost as if the band is chasing after him, keeping close behind, wary where their captain might turn next. Cassadaga, a loosely structured concept album and the band's most musically accomplished effort to date, is perhaps Oberst's defining statement, a country-tinged reflection on Americana that careens from one sunbaked locale to the next with the momentum of a dynamo.Named for the community of Cassadaga, Florida, the unofficial "Psychic Center of the World," the album opens with the voice of a kindly woman on a psychic hotline. Over the chaotic heaves and swells of an orchestra, she outlines a meandering cross-country journey our hero must take: "Somehow I get the impression that you're almost a little afraid to start the trip." But once the second track, "Four Winds," kicks in, there's no looking back. Shambling rhythms bolster winging, whining fiddles as the song stirs together a fresh and energizing new sound from traditional rustic ingredients. In the verses Oberst regales with a panorama of images of a fractured America before the chorus lifts in a concentrated and fiery refrain: "And it's the sum of man / Slouching toward Bethlehem."As the album progresses, the journey takes on myriad shades of meaning. "If the Brakeman Turns My Way," with its twanging pedal steel and bright piano chords, paints the trip as a necessary search for balance: "First a mother bathes her child / Then the other way around / The scales always find a way to level out." Other tracks pay homage to the myths of American music. "Classic Cars," for example, begins with the striking quatrain, "She was a real royal lady / True patron of the arts / Said the best country singers / Die in the back of classic cars." As organ trills delicately on the horizon, the singer outlines, in hushed emotional tones, a short-lived yet formative affair with an older woman. With Cassadaga, Oberst delivers on the promise of his earlier work, crafting a rich, invigorating journey through the heart of America."