Thursday, February 24, 2011

Bright Eyes - The People's Key: differ on the definition of rock

Bright Eyes is one of the bands whose creative cycle is more uniform. Approximately every two years can enjoy a new album Oberts and company, so the natural speech of the events was to meet with The People's Key. Their seventh studio album is the first in which the duo has become usual trio with the addition of Nate Walcott to the couple formed by Oberst and Mogis, with whom he collaborated on a regular basis and in his previous work.

The People's Key has a job unappealing, to maintain the level, or at least save the dishes, with respect to Cassadaga, the one considered by the majority of critics as his best album to date, which is very questionable if we consider the fantastic'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. In any case, the bar is sky high and this continues to be a burden to tackling the album, both for and against the tide by blow.

And in this case, there seems to be calm. We are demanding. Groups such as Bright Eyes have built a reputation and a career that hopefully makes a lot of his records. And not just as a whole, but also hope to meet face to face one of those songs that become the background music of a particular time of day, week after week, as did your day 'First Day Of My Life' with many of us .

However, if there is anything that defines The People's Key is the uniformity that exists between the songs that comprise it. No court whose inclusion is not entirely justified within the style or directly brought by his predecessor in the tracklist. Consistency is always desirable, but this is one of those times when walking down the thin red line that separates it from the monotony.

The beginning of the disc does not help at all. In 'Firewall' we stumbled upon a monologue of two minutes and twenty seconds that makes kick when you sense that it is not inspired a few sentences that seek to enter the code used on the album. This time, the lyrical mysticism began in Cassadaga Oberst becomes somewhat diffuse, and without instrumentation stand out from the lyrics and a warm voice and at times mischievous or torn, the minutes are long, and when you reach the second track seems to half-disk wear hearing.

The freshness has become lukewarm, and blow air on his face that made up the majority of his previous albums has become an atmosphere slightly uncomfortable but not oppressive. Does not even bother, it is tentatively in no man's land. Only in the most private moments, like the magnificent 'Ladder Song', written when he was devastated by the suicide of a friend, we can see some of the wonder that is capable of Oberst.

These recent statements by Oberst make my approach to The People's Key I have been even more disconcerting. The American sound is still present, camouflaged by some electrical hardness in some cases that the singer has concluded that there must be rock, but for me it is too timid in an attempt to get out of the warm waters in which they have moved ahead and how has given good results, especially when it comes to acoustic instruments and even more in the half-times and the songs of a more intimate setting.

The songs are closer to this aim are 'Shell Games', 'Haile Selassie', and above all 'Jejune Stars', the only one who did manage a dip in the rock but where Oberst's voice, for me one of the most deserving of Bright Eyes, continues attenuated and edited so that it loses warmth and acuity gains, staying on the surface and subtracting soul to many of the songs.

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