Bright Eyes w/Her Space Holiday, the Prom
Paradox Theater, 5510 University Way NE, 524-7677, Sat Sept 30, 8 pm, $8.
I’VE BEEN LISTENING to the Bright Eyes record Fevers and Mirrors. It is haunted, obsessed–shot through with desire and self-immolating pain. It recalls the tortured poetry of Daniel Johnston, and the exquisite early-20th-century cabaret of Bertolt Brecht. This is odd, because it doesn’t have the same pathos as the former or a similar bathos to the latter. Perhaps that’s because its creator, 20-year-old Nebraskan Conner Oberst, with his trembling, hurt voice, manages, like Johnston, to capture the fear of being left behind so well; perhaps it’s because Oberst also enjoys a rich, rollicking rhythm like all those decadent prewar Germanic types. I don’t know. I missed the fellow live when he played London recently–show of the century, apparently. I was scared he might move me to do something I might regret–to applaud or something.
Fevers and Mirrors is a supremely indulgent record. At one stage Oberst is interviewed on radio, and the track ends with more questions than it begins with. Fevers and Mirrors is also a richly rewarding record. There is such obsession here, you see. Why make pop music if you don’t feel these depths and depravity of emotion? Perhaps the fact that Oberst is a lapsed Catholic has something to do with his unquenchable desire, I couldn’t tell you. I’m not qualified. All I know is that within the spindly, lo-fi grooves of songs like “The Calendar Hung Itself…” and the pivotal “A Spindle, a Darkness, a Fever and a Necklace,” there is beauty and intensity of emotion that is rare to find nowadays.
This man is playing your fair city. I would advise you to go along and do the decent thing. Swoon.