Although there’s a big difference between Conor Oberst’s first album as Bright Eyes and his most recent solo work, his trajectory as a songwriter has been a simple one. A Collection of Songs Written & Recorded 1995-1997 certainly had a folky quality to it, but was more or less a straight derivative of the teenaged Oberst’s lo-fi and alternative record collection. Ever since then, he’s been tempering those songs’ raw, indie rock formula with incremental doses of country & western professionalism, sprinkling another pinch or two into the ether on a record-by-record basis. Gradually, the bedroom fuzz has peeled away to reveal increasingly pristine layers of audio quality, while Oberst continues to refine his songs and concepts into less personal and obtuse forms. And although he’s never quite achieved what most would call a good voice, the throaty wails and quivering whispers that once served as an emotional amplifier for his confessional lyrics have also been disciplined and mellowed.
Depending on who you ask, Oberst perfectly balanced the equation somewhere around 2002’s Lifted… or 2005’s I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. From a qualitative standpoint they’re roughly equal, and which record you prefer is, as always, a matter of taste: the former seethes with the last fiery gasps of adolescence in a 22-year-old man, whereas the latter finds that same guy gracefully entering a place of maturity, a young adulthood in its twilight. But from there, the C&W undertones have risen to the surface, and Oberst has lost a good bit of what once made his music so unique, visceral, and polarizing. 2007’s Cassadaga benefited from its shit-kicking fiddles and some fine spectral spaceouts, but it also suffered from snore-worthy southern dalliances like “Classic Cars” and “Soul Singer in a Session Band.” The years since have found Oberst spending his time on work under his own name with his Mystic Valley Band and the collaboration-heavy supergroup Monsters of Folk, with results that are increasingly countrified, plainly listenable, and uniformly boring. Which raises the question of whether or not all this straight-laced folk rockin’ has provided Oberst with an escape from the neuroses and troubles that once made his music alive and kinetic, or whether it’s just something of a sunny break from them.
Lo, here we find a litmus test: a reissued and expanded release of Bright Eyes’ 2004 collaboration with Neva Dinova, One Jug of Wine, Two Vessels. On the original, six-track EP, Oberst and Dinova mainman Jake Bellows split singer-songwriter duties before a motley assortment of musicians from their respective bands — and for this updated version, the players reassembled in late 2009 for two more songs from each songwriter, turning it into a 10-track LP. It’s interesting enough that they’ve decided to recast an old EP as a new album, but what’s crucial here is that Oberst’s contributions to the original release sounded very much like the midpoint between Lifted and Wide Awake that they were. So his two new songs here stand to either stick out like sore thumbs or reverse more than half a decade of exponential countrification and middling out.
Fortunately, it’s the latter. “Happy Accident” is vintage Bright Eyes through and through, a goddamn lovely melody filled out by yowled harmonies from the gut/heart and lyrics that read like they were written by that one edgy high school poet who’s actually going somewhere. It’s not quite of the stuff that defined Bright Eyes’ strongest work, but it could’ve been one of the catchier tunes on their mid-period releases. Oberst’s other tune here, “I Know You,” sounds a bit like Cassadaga’s songwriting through the lens of Wide Awake’s production and arrangement, making for a somewhat less gripping but not unwelcome tune. Dinova, for his part, turns in a highlight with the propulsive opener “Rollerskating” and one of the set’s lesser songs in “Someone’s Love.” The original EP’s six tracks are unchanged: largely decent material that gets overshadowed by the gems of Oberst’s bouncy “I’ll Be Your Friend” and the winsomely Oberst-penned, Bellows-sung “Spring Cleaning.”
The sum total makes for a decent record and a marked improvement over the original, but it’s mostly exciting for the effortless way in which Oberst makes such a natural return to form. Retreading familiar ground is admittedly something of a cheap trick, but I get the feeling he wouldn’t have done it were he not revisiting a record from 2004, and it’s good enough that it’s hard to chastise him for it. What will be interesting to see is whether the eventual Bright Eyes full-length also takes the nostalgic route, continues to pour on the country grits, or does something that’s both or neither — but this release is a sign that the project’s back, and Oberst’s southern vacation might just be reaching an end.
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