The People's Key: A Companion in Bloomington, MN

Returning to
Bright Eyes
after a three-year solo-ish sojourn,
Conor Oberst
switches gears for
The People's Key
, downshifting from the rustic canyon rock of
the Mystic Valley Band
so he can ride a moody modern rock vibe not too dissimilar from
Digital Ash in a Digital Urn
. Passing resemblances aside,
is quite different in tone and tenor than
Digital Ash
, the somewhat tempered corrective to the self-styled major statement
I'm Wide Awake It's Morning
. Like the
Mystic Valley
albums before them,
is deliberately not designed as a major statement; perhaps it possesses recurrent themes -- spirituality drifts through the album, often taking shape in vague Rastafarian sentiments; the album is bookended by murmured recitations that play like library finds, not spoken truths -- but the album lacks heft. Generally, the songs are concise -- the opener and closer flirt with seven minutes but that's all due to the elongated narrations -- driven by melody and bearing nicely textured arrangements that leave plenty of space for analog synths lifted from the early days of
MTV
. Disregarding the lyrics -- something that is not easy or necessarily optimal with
Oberst
, who is continuing to whittle away his overwritten excesses --
is
' poppiest record by some measure, trading anthems with the weight of America on their shoulders for sculptured miniatures. Perhaps it lacks ballast and gestalt, but
arguably operates better on a smaller scale, trading pretension for fractured pop that cuts into the cranium with skewed precision. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine