Bright Eyes’ early albums seemed to be made out of necessity. Fevers and Mirrors sounded like an album that had to be produced in order to prevent Connor Oberst’s overwhelming surges of emotion from consuming him in a fiery flood of sorrow and joy. After Fevers, which he wrote between the ages of 18-20, that sound of necessity started slowly disappearing in favor of albums consisting of a mixture of good, honest sounding songs with a few lackluster ones thrown in as filler. Up to the simultaneous release of Digital Ash In A Digital Urn and I’m Wide Awake, Its Morning, the good tracks outweighed the bad ones, but with the release of Cassadega, the sometimes ridiculously brooding, sometimes overwhelmingly clear and insightful Oberst we knew and loved (or loved to hate) gave way to a pretty middle-of-the-road set of songs. His intense bursts of exuberance and depression evened out into a flatter emotional tone.

Oberst has stated that he wanted to move away from the country/folk sound of Cassadega in favor of something more rock oriented. The People’s Key accomplishes this. There is plenty of distortion and effects on the guitars and vocals. There is even a brief blast beat in the song “Jejune Stars”, but his warbley, reedy vocal delivery hasn’t changed at all, making the album sound like, well, what it is: Bright Eyes trying to make a rock album.

The album opens with “Firewall,” featuring a cool sample of a man talking about The Sumerian Tablets, reptilian beings, and the fourth dimension that belongs on an episode of the radio show Coast to Coast with George Noory. Sparse, minor key guitar comes in along with some lyrics that are what you have come to expect from Bright Eyes: “I saw a hologram at the theme park/She looked as real as me through the wet fog.” The song even includes some funky wah-effect guitar that actually works well.

“Shell Games” starts out alright, with Oberst singing about wanting to undo his past acts of cruelty toward others, but quickly turns into a cheesy pop song about “heavy love”. “Beginner’s Mind” is much the same. It starts out pleasantly sparse, with just Connor and a guitar, but takes a similar turn, this time about the dangers of cynicism. Whatever spiritual growth he has achieved may for the best as far as his inner life goes, but it seems to have done a number on his songwriting abilities.

“A Machine Spiritual” features some guitar work that differs quite a bit from early Bright Eyes material and is one of the strongest songs on the album, both lyrically and instrumentally. A rapidly strummed guitar that sounds digitally chopped up is backed by some reverbed drums and bass, supporting lyrics that have that darkly hopeful quality that has been missing since Digital Ash. We find Connor resignedly trying to make sense of what often seems meaningless with phrases like “Another and another we go/ Form some kind of code/ The bodies float/ Form some kind of code/ Of flesh and bone.”

“Ladder Song”, another of the album’s highlights, is a solid, slow song consisting primarily of Connor’s reverbed vocals mingling with a warm, yet dark, piano that sounds like it was recorded onto tape. Though some of its lyrics are a bit contrived, lines like “I wanna fly in your silver ship/ Let Jesus hang and Buddha sit” pleasantly remind us of Oberst’s classic romantic disregard, and the closing line “You’re not alone in anything/ You’re not alone in trying to be” is refreshingly clear and honest.

The album ends with Oberst repeating over and over again the phrase “You and me/ Thats an awful lie/ Its I and I.” This, combined with his references to the Lion of Judah, Haile Selassie, and the zen-tinged “Beginner’s mind” all come together to create a new age pop rock album that lyrically and musically does not live up to Bright Eyes’s earlier work.

There was one phrase, however, standing out above all others on the album, that was powerfully honest enough to rival any part of Fevers and Mirrors, Lifted, or I’m Wide Awake, Its Morning. On “Haile Selassie”, Connor sings “All of our days are numbered/ I’ve taken some comfort/ In knowing the wave has crested/ Knowing I don’t have to be an exception.” There is something overwhelmingly sad about the resignation in that phrase that on the surface seems, especially when paired with the upbeat melody, to be trivial. It is as though he is admitting that his best songwriting days are at an end, and (allowing room for the album to grow on its listeners in the way that all Bright Eyes releases seem to do) this album, though it has its moments of pleasant darkness and bright, genuine light, reflects that.

Track List:

1. Firewall
2. Shell Games
3. Jejune Stars
4. Approximate Sunlight
5. Haile Selassie
6. A Machine Spiritual (In The People’s Key)
7. Triple Spiral
8. Beginner’s Mind
9. Ladder Song
10. One for You, One for Me