Bright Eyes: Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was

- Historically, Bright Eyes have eschewed pigeonholing by continually releasing drastically disparate albums. Over their critically-acclaimed career, they’ve made orchestral, electronic, rock, and folk albums, but despite their inability to stick to a genre, they have always managed to make an album that is, somehow, quintessentially Bright Eyes. While the sobriquet Bright Eyes was formerly synonymous with Conner Oberst himself, they are in fact a band of three key elements. In addition to Oberst, the other paramount members responsible for their sonic acumen, are producer/ multi-instrumentalist Mike Mogis and trumpet/keyboard player Nate Walcott, who also writes the band’s string arrangements. After an unofficial hiatus, the eclectic outfit are back in 2020 with their characteristically loquacious new album, Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was and while the music and its epithet are equally grandiose, the album is simply a masterpiece.

Down in the Weeds begins like every other Bright Eyes album, with an ethereal soundscape that serves as an introduction to the album proper. Titled, Pageturner’s Rag, this one begins with footsteps before a Spanish monologue with the only discernible phrase being, “your most vivid nightmares”. The first song on the album is the verbose Dance and Sing where Oberst crows “gotta keep on going like it’s not the end” while referencing firing squads, ice-cream socials, raves and Nietzsche. Here, Oberst is accompanied by a litany of sounds, from the banjo of Mogis to the ghostly choir and cinematic string orchestra that is scattered throughout the album on songs like One and Done, Stairwell Song, and Comet Song. Elsewhere, electronic sounds come in to play, like in the pop track Mariana Trench which references highs and lows (literally) from Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench. Juxtaposing these hi-fi sounds are the lo-fi acoustic sounds of the earliest DIY Bright Eyes albums on tracks like Tilt-A-Whirl and Calais To Dover.

While the album is musically eclectic, the lyrical themes are consistent throughout the album. On Down in the Weeds, Oberst deals with loss in myriad forms. As stated in the press release, Oberst was ruminating on the sudden death of his brother and the dissolution of his marriage, both of which pervade the album. While the emotional height generates nostalgic feelings of the band synonymous with teenage angst, it is conversely as sophisticated and mature as anything they have produced and yet another milestone in the catalogue of a brilliant band fuelled by seemingly endless talent.

- Jon Cloumassis.
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