One-and-a-half score years and several months ago, the country-rock band the Eagles had arenas full of fans vicariously checking themselves in at the Hotel California, one of those dark, alluring, mythical places of decadent American lore; the song's intricate, gothic 12-string arpeggios like sticky, silvery webs ornamenting descriptions of the occult, drugs, and unspoken-of, forbidden rites. I wasn't quite four years old when it hit the airwaves, but even so, the song itself was, for me, as haunted and inescapable as the hotel it chronicled, and seemed to grow in stature and become mythical in its own right as I grew up. Those were the days when Satan was a devil. But singer-songwriter Conor Oberst, native of Nebraska, and verbose mastermind behind Bright Eyes, has just released a Hotel California for his own more agnostic-pantheistic time, where the glamor of drug-infested colonies of Satan-worshippers has been eclipsed by the dubious soft-focus enlightenment of new age spiritualist communes.
And if Cassadaga, a sprawling country-rock masterwork named for one such commune, opens like a seance, with a woman rambling hypnotically about journeys and vortices beneath the sky-size, ever-morphing swirl of a symphony orchestra's tuning up, Oberst ultimately engages his listeners as if he's pitching a new series - something along the lines of Carnivale - to the folks at HBO: with grand lyrical gestures, intimations of death, impending destruction, and wisdom gleaned from prostitutes - yeah, I've been fucked, so what? - in the beds of dusty, 19th Century brothels; stuck all over with pesky yellow Post-It notes from the contemporary world, references to Blackberry (or, as we at the office call it, Crackberry) calls, and other various nagging, anachronistic mood-breakers. Cassadaga is a bedazzling expanse of Western wilderness, built on fake plastic oral histories and orchestral swells like Bierstadt paintings, designed and executed specifically to make the genuinely grand artificially grander; and to revive, in pop culture's special way, some of the darker bits of This American Life embedded like fossils, or carved like Mt. Rushmore into some collective memory, replayed unconsciously every time we talk about invading another Middle Eastern country.
When you listened to earlier Bright Eyes records - especially the 2002 breakthrough Lifted, or the Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground - there was such confessional intimacy that you almost felt Conor's breath on your face as he sang, his voice full of eager, quivering vulnerability - a contagious sort of personal unease. But it's not breath you feel when listening to Cassadaga, but rather the percussive breeze of sound waves issuing from a huge stereo speaker on full volume; or the powering wind of a spring storm on the prairie. If parts of Lifted sounded like they'd been recorded in the semi-privacy of one of those photo booths at an abandoned shopping mall, Cassadaga has a bigness foretelling a sold-out engagement at Red Rocks. Never has Oberst allowed himself so much head-held-high self-assurance in his singing - which, by the way, makes his voice far more palatable to uninitiated listeners - and rarely has his writing seemed as outward-looking. All of which adds up to the most accessible Bright Eyes record to date.
Sure, a little of the distinctiveness of the Bright Eyes sound has been lost, necessarily, in Oberst's apparent bid to out-Band the Band, but this particular set of songs - uniformly strong, and almost invariably catchy, all clocking in at just over an hour - can certainly handle that loss. Here we have a swinging country song called "Four Winds", all twangy Opry fiddles and allusions to our humiliated Middle Eastern aspirations veiled in the burqa of a good-time sing-along barn-dance rouser. And here we have a contemplation of mortality and ecological justice evolving into a triumphantly stomping call-and-response chorus in "If The Brakeman Turns My Way". And here we have "Soul Singer in a Session Band", a many-versed campfire hymn on the necessary perils of selling out to a sell-out world. And so it goes. And so it goes. "Coat Check Dream Song" closes with an Islamic call to prayer leading into the positively chipper "I Must Belong Somewhere", an occasionally uncomfortably amoral - almost Buddhist - affirmation of purpose.
The songs of Cassadaga aren't united by a story so much as a uniform band sound that always eschews do-it-yourself quirk in favor of classic film score magnificence, and a cohesive collection of lyrical images and themes - chiefly, a broad concern with the various intersections (not to mention the various intercourses) of spirituality and prostitution. How many shares of ourselves can we get away with selling before we're no longer the majority shareholder and subject to hostile take-over by the world? And if hostile takeover is inevitable, why not embrace it. These, and other absurd questions, dubious pleasures, and gloomy entertainments await those who enter the cardboard digipak doors of Bright Eyes' Cassadaga. It's unlikely the teenagers of tomorrow will whisper to each other about the titillating naughtiness of this record the way me and my friends did with regards to Hotel California. In a world where little is sacred, it takes a lot more to be profane. But then, that's what Cassadaga's all about. And if it doesn't pack the raw, emotional wallop of Lifted, it ultimately seduces us with its marriage of lyrical scope and sonic grandeur.
Plus, it comes with a super-cool spectral decoder.
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BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW:
"Cassadaga" by Bright Eyes
Saddle Creek Records
Released 4/10/07
Produced by Conor Oberst
62 min.
SONGS: Clairaudients (Kill or Be Killed) - Four Winds - If the Brakeman Turns My Way - Hot Knives - Make a Plan to Love Me - Soul Singer in a Session Band - Classic Cars - Middleman - Cleanse Song - No One Would Riot For Less - Coat Check Dream Song - I Must Belong Somewhere - Lime Tree
If I m Wide Awake... was the New York City album , then Cassadaga is the America album , in which Conor Oberst diaries his travels around the country ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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