Conor Oberst

When Conor Oberst emerged on the music scene under the pseudonym "Bright Eyes," his tortured bedroom/grandiose baroque folk incited many to hail the youth as the next Dylan. These comparisons weren't drawn on the fact that he was a carbon copy, but rather that he possessed the lyrical prowess and unique musical sensibility to craft a modernized subset of emotive folk. As the singer matured, he slowly traded the idiosyncrasies that earmarked his early output for the time-proven propensities of those before him. Now, with the release of an eponymous disc under his own name, Oberst sounds more like a skillful imitator than a genre-defining prodigy.

In its favor, Conor Oberst travels the path beaten by the singer's predecessors more proficiently than his last tepid offering, Cassadaga. The album's ruminations on the well-trodden themes of the road and escapism are, for the most part, enjoyable and even sporadically enthralling. The opener, "Cape Canaveral," finds Oberst at his best, painting lush depictions of freeway lines and spaceships over Kennedy, which blend into an image of atonement on a canvas of rhythm and lead guitar. The resounding minor chords and haunting quaver of Oberst's voice on "Lenders in the Temple" hang a visceral melancholy over his lament of frail love and passionless captivity. Oberst's solo performance of "Milk Thistle" provides a poignant closer; his earnest melodies and solemn guitar lines hemming together the album's undercurrents beneath the ubiquitous silhouette of death.

Though these tracks vaguely recall Oberst's inimitably affecting early work, many of the other tracks teeter on—or dive recklessly into—hackney territory. "Get-Well-Cards" features clichéd folk imagery delivered with an unabashedly Dylan twang, while the vocal cadence of "Moab" brazenly evokes Tom Petty. Though these parrotings are passively enjoyable, “Sausalito” and "I Don't Want to Die" prove unredeemable. These musical-paint-by-numbers find Oberst jamming rehashed musings like, "Help me get my boots on, I got to go, go, go, 'cause I don't have a home," into stock alt-country templates.

In the end, it is hard to escape the feeling that most of Conor Oberst is pre-digested. While it's rarely displeasing, Oberst's lyrical connotations feel stale and his stories are pre-explicated, while the music rarely transcends the country shuffles and twangy riffs you'd expect to back these motifs. Even though Oberst has fine-tuned his impersonations, it's disheartening to hear an artist that once cultivated such a unique voice rest so contently on the laurels of a genre.

—Jay Watford
08.08.08

Abandoning the Bright Eyes moniker he's been performing under since his teens, Conor Oberst reverted to his birth name for his 2008 follow-up to 2007's Cassadaga. As he not only released the record under his own name but titled it Conor Oberst, it's hard not to think of the album as a new beginning or statement of purpose, as that's generally the case when a singer/songwriter splits from his main band, but this is such a low-key record it can't support such grand theories. But that subdued attitude is in fact a major difference between this and Bright Eyes albums, where every action tended to be over-amplified, a practice Oberst generally avoids here. Part of it is down to mere circumstance. Struck with one of his bursts of wanderlust, Oberst headed down to Mexico to cut the album, gathering together a collection of friends who he dubbed the Mystic Valley Band, a name bearing an uncanny resemblance to such '70s country-rock outfits as Rick Nelson's Stone Canyon Band. Naturally, this is a conscious move, as much of this tight 12-track album resides firmly within the confines of classic country-rock, whether it's a mellow ramble like "Danny Callahan" or the dust-kicking "I Don't Want to Die (In the Hospital)." These benefit greatly by the loose-limbed Mystic Valley Band, who infuse a great deal of warmth to this music, but their open-heartedness is a reflection of Oberst's subtle shift to relying on modest gestures instead of grand ones. Although he still has a tendency to shoehorn five-dollar words into every other phrase -- particularly when it comes time to write ballads -- he's not trying quite so hard here, letting his lyrics be almost as relaxed as his music. But the fact that the music does feel relaxed, even when it bears his classicist affectations, does make Conor Oberst markedly different than the music of Bright Eyes, and makes it a worthwhile project -- even if it proves to be a detour instead of a new beginning. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide