Bright Eyes : Five Dice, All Threes
Bright Eyes have already left an outsize footprint on indie rock. Over three decades and ten albums, they’ve evolved from sooty emo to widescreen Americana to baroque futurism, fueled by frontman Conor Oberst’s bleak truisms and rabid emotion. Five Dice, All Threes, their 11th LP, feels like a new peak. It may be the best music from Oberst, Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott since 2005’s beloved I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning, recalling the group’s early-2000s golden age without sounding any less ornate than their more recent records. But where the arrangements on the last two (2011’s The People’s Key and 2020’s Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was) suffered from stateliness, here they sputter and snarl, dislocated, with a hint of breakdown to mirror modern confusion.
There are moments of static and dissonance throughout; the most striking comes on “Spun Out,” when Oberst throws his broken voice into a Doppler effect digital swirl. But even the more conventional songs have an uncouth edge that makes them thrilling. “Bells and Whistles” hinges on a whistled chorus worthy of The Shins, though it’s hard to imagine James Mercer opening a song with an immediate self-castigation, voice half-blown to shreds (“At a table down at Edendale/ Didn’t feel good, wasn’t eating well/ And the photo booth made me hate myself/ What a slob”) and then reflecting on the alienation he feels from his closest fans: “Signed a sleeve for a teenager/ It fеlt just like a harbinger/ I was shaking hands with the manicurеd/ Worked my fingers to the bone.”
At the same time, a communal spirit runs through Five Dice, All Threes—not in any cheesy easy answers way, but in terms of presence: guest musicians, old movie dialogue, the mystical gambling motif from which it draws its title. Even sad, slow songs like “Tiny Suicides” and “The Time I Have Left” (the latter featuring The National’s Matt Berninger) feel like group sing-alongs. In that sense, the album’s closest cousin in the Bright Eyes catalog is Lifted. The maturity is evident, but this is still a welcome return to the lovably unrestrained ethic that launched the band to national fame back in 2002.
But it’s to the album’s credit that the most compelling song here is the least typical of all: “All Threes.” Elevated by guest vocals from Cat Power’s Chan Marshall, the song is unlike anything else in the Bright Eyes catalog: sultry, jazzy, devilishly hummable. It’s the first Bright Eyes song with a beat. Naturally Oberst saves room for vitriol—but where his younger self would have been deadly serious, now he opts for cracked whimsy: “Elon Musk in virgin whites/ I’ll kill him in an alley over five dice.” He ups the ante a few tracks later, coming for leaders writ large on “Hate”: “I hate prophets/ I hate L.A. shamans/ Abraham, Adam and Isaiah and Mohammed . . . David Koresh, Jim Jones, and Buddha/ I hate this twisted logic, the sadistic hallelujah.”
No one ever accused Bright Eyes of subtlety, and we should be thankful for that. Because you just can’t argue with Conor Oberst. He’s too unblinking, too gifted of a melody maker. Even in the quiet songs, there are no half measures, no recourse to irony. Like the best Bright Eyes records, Five Dice, All Threes tells us it’s okay to tap into big feelings at the source. These days, that’s a more welcome reminder than ever.
Label: Dead Oceans
Year: 2024
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Bright Eyes : Five Dice, All Threes
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