Bright Eyes: Four Winds

CML call number: CD ROCK Bright
Kelefa Sanneh wrote in the New York Times: "[Conor] Oberst, 27, has been the main — sometimes the only — member of Bright Eyes for more than a decade. … Friday's concert … celebrated the release of a six-song CD, 'Four Winds.' … Backed by a ragged but solid band that included … fellow singer-songwriter M. Ward … Mr. Oberst barreled through a handful of old songs and a fistful of new ones. Perhaps none was better than the new single, 'Four Winds,' a scuffed-up folk-rock song. … Mr. Oberst conjured up a chaotic world: 'Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe/There's people always dying trying to keep 'em alive/There's bodies decomposing in containers tonight.' A few years ago Mr. Oberst might have tried to tidy up this mess. But now, even as the ringing chorus — one of his grandest — arrived, this song remained elusive. There were references to poets and psychics and American Indian burial grounds, to the Whore of Babylon and 'Great Satan.' Somehow it all fit into four buoyant minutes. He sounded less like a kid raging at the world and more like a guy trying to live in it."