The People's Keys - Bright Eyes

Conor Oberst has fallen victim to expectations.

Back in the late ’90s/early ’00s, Oberst plied a particular brand of angsty folk as Bright Eyes, and he was good at what he did: the emoting of youth, with prodigious lyricism and songcraft. And he’s back with a new Bright Eyes record, The People’s Key—the first since 2007.

The problem is, between then and now Oberst showed his hand. Released under his own name, 2008’s Conor Oberst, a swinging, country-inflected, highly mature rock album, showed him as an expert storyteller and an artist tapped into an American vein.

Although The People’s Key isn’t a step backwards from that album, it’s at best a lateral move. Like Sufjan Stevens on his recent The Age of Adz, Oberst trades some of his acoustic instrumentation for cellar electronics, but he lacks Sufjan’s sense of innovation. It’s not quite as inorganic as 2005’s Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, but that’s not a bad comparison.

When Oberst ratchets up the pace, as on the tense “Triple Spiral” and the throbbing, locomotive “Haile Selassie,” Bright Eyes gets at least some cylinders humming, but with the soft, bleating instrumentation of the weaker tracks blends into a sort of narcoleptic stagger. The People’s Key lacks the humanistic quiver of Digital Ash, and though nothing sounds bad—every song is solid, really—whole sections slide by without leaving a mark.

Lyrically, Oberst seems to be going for a more impressionistic bent than on his self-titled album or past Bright Eyes records, but though this style avoids the near-emo tendencies of his earlier work, it also disorients the songs. “Stay a while, my inner child/I’d like to learn your trick,” from “Beginner’s Mind,” is not only toothless but ambiguous, and most of The People’s Key trades in similar mediocrity.

It’s only in view of his recent successes that The People’s Key really suffers; though it’s a capable if unspectacular album, Oberst has revealed himself to be a much better writer than these songs indicate. Here’s hoping he comes to this realization himself.