Bright Eyes - Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was Review
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Where hopelessness becomes too much, Bright Eyes pull out all the stops to a weird sense of optimism with a maximalist approach.
The name Conor Oberst is as prolific as it is pretentious - the Nebraska native has an extensive repertoire and a handful of accolades under his belt, earning him a spot as one of the indie world’s most revered songwriters. As a man with his finger in every proverbial pie, Oberst spent the majority of his most acclaimed band’s nine-year hiatus focusing on solo projects and other collaborations. Now, emerging from almost a decade of silence, Bright Eyes reclaim their cultural status with their latest record, Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was.
Tonally, this album is a contemporary take on their earlier work, featuring the same folky Americana sound amidst grandiose orchestral instrumentation and distorted electronic textures. A joining of threads plucked from Bright Eyes’ own back-catalogue, the new record does not attempt to recapture the spirit of youth but, rather, takes all the most notable aspects of the band’s renowned style and shapes it to fit the middle-aged, middle-America, mid-crisis narrative.
Down in the Weeds… covers a lot of ground lyrically. It was imaginably a cathartic experience for Oberst to pen such despairing, pensive and brutally honest tracks - he’s endured everything from divorce, to the death of a brother, to a false accusation of sexual assault. ‘Hot Car in the Sun’ is perhaps the saddest of the bunch, tackling head-on the painful aftermath of the separation from his ex-wife. He further dissects the breakdown of their relationship on ‘Dover to Calais’ - a ferry ride on which he “just knew that it was over”. Elsewhere, his brother’s ghost haunts the sombre and revealing ‘Stairwell Song’. In true Bright Eyes fashion, Oberst even laments on the state of the world, from terrorist attacks on ‘To Death’s Heart (In Three Parts)’ to the apocalyptic “crumbling 405 when the big one hits” on ‘Mariana Trench’.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though. Where hopelessness becomes too much, Bright Eyes pull out all the stops to a weird sense of optimism with a maximalist approach. The tempo is hiked up, bagpipes soar (‘Persona Non Grata’), and ragtime piano dances over a recorded snippet of a three-hour-long shrooms trip (‘Pageturners Rag’). Oberst and Co. manage to pack a lifetime of emotion into one record and deliver it with a montage-style arrangement of music pilfered from an array of influences. Still, it’s distinctively Bright Eyes.
By and large, the album is an impressive collection for both new fans and old. Oberst noted in a recent interview that he and his long-time collaborators were conscious of making a cohesive record - one that wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb amongst their other work. It’s clear that a lot of love went into its production, and though it occasionally misses the mark as any 10th record might, Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was bares witness to the rightful success of a band well-loved.