Conor Oberst turned 31 on Tuesday. Yes, the boy wonder, the youthful genius, is, well, no longer a boy. He hasn't been for quite some time. Fittingly, his most recent album and the first from the Bright Eyes moniker since 2007's Cassadaga, is coming out today. Perhaps he hasn't changed that much, after all, what with this presumptuous birthday present to himself. But one listen to The People's Key and there is a recognizable difference, dare I say, maturity, to the sound of the record. Yes, yes, yes, don't worry. He's still dealing with life's difficulties and the human's transport through time and life and hell and all of that. There is an edge to it though, not sonically, not like an ass-kicking Desaparecidos song with huge guitar hooks and loud screams, but there's something dark, harvested far beneath the surface. Oberst has been a rock star for what is far beyond the majority of his life, having been Commander of Venus at age thirteen.
The album begins with an eerie prelude, not in music but spoken word, of some man giving a compacted history of evil and its manifestation upon the human race. This beginning to ""Firewall"" makes such claims as Hitler being the offspring of an ancient evil race that ""goes back—back into Sumerian times."" Whoa, Oberst. Play me some god damned shaky acoustic guitar and talk about fevers and mirrors, already. But ""Firewall"" picks up and evolves into an immensely surrealistic, dreamlike song evoking a female ""hologram at the theme park"" with veins ""full of flat cherry cola"" and the song continues with very stark images (Ezra Pound would certainly be proud) until its brilliant culmination. This mystery woman is suddenly in control of the speaker's thoughts and mind. We are informed that ""light to dark can shift in an instant,"" and that she ""fills my mind with jump ropes and slit wrists."" Ah, yes, that's the Oberst we all know from those long rides in the car back in high school. Wait, though, the song is actually pretty fucking brilliant and we learn he will ""bust through the fire and walk into Heaven,"" subject to ""crooked crosses falling from the sky."" The rambling man at the opening of the album did, in fact, have something to do with the art of the song, the album, and the evil is revisited in what is, ultimately, a song of salvation.
Oberst rolls on from the opener with songs equally as stunning in their lyrical imagery as they are in ambitious musical production, for an Oberst that has clung pretty tightly to his trusty folk and country-folk sound. ""Jejune Stars"" delivers a rockin' punch of reflective nostalgia. He welcomes the troubles of ""fire,"" ""water,"" and karma, noting that ""we're all in transition / The wheel I'm becoming erases the physical mind"" and even takes us back to days of kissing under the bleachers. Both ""Approximate Sunlight"" and ""A Machine Spiritual (In The People's Key)"" recall the boy wonder of old, replete with those same whining and youthful inflections of that oh-so-distinguishable voice.
Perhaps the most profound song on the entire album, ""Triple Spiral"" rocks with a deceptive up-tempo cadence and depicts Oberst's fall to despair. He proclaims his love for the triple spiral, ""Father, son, and ghost,"" and tragically states and restates his fall first with the existential ""how sad it is to know I'm in control"" and further with ""that's the problem, an empty sky/I fill it up with everything that's missing from my life"" in a beautifully dark crescendo of guitar fuzz.
The mysticism of The People's Key and its close attention to the relativity of the universe seems not to speak on what Oberst had formerly focused, his own esoteric troubles and copings, but the difficulty of mankind. Where he had fallen just short in Cassadaga and his two solo albums, Oberst strikes the chord cleanly and has finally found his niche in his maturity on The People's Key. He communicates the bitch that life is, how quickly time moves, all the while offering love as a remedy. In such, the album (with an admirable range of sounds, mind you) succeeds as art. It captures the essence of how profound the human condition is and will always be. For this, I will argue that it is one of his best records ever, solo or group, though a clear favorite cannot be chosen among this, the double release of I'm Wide Awake It's Morning and Digital Ash In A Digital Urn, and the Desaparecidos gem, Read Music/Speak Spanish. Bright Eyes is back.
