Bright Eyes, Little Else Going For Him

So I've been getting a lot of white noise recently regarding this Bright Eyes guy, and a lot of it I have been given to bending an ear to. After all, it's only every other year that the grand old men of music criticism, in their rheumatic senility christen another Bob Dylan. This time they're right, but not for the reason that Bright Eyes is truly transcendant folk-pop, because he's not. He is just another tendril in this pop artist as Indy-rocker tendril from the cancerous, metasticizing mass of dumb that the RCAA subjects teenagers to. We've heard songwriting like this before, and much better at that, from such as Death Cab for Cutie, and we've heard a great lyricked techno album before, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone and all that. And all of this showed alot more artistic balls than this Bright Eyes fellow. Because if you title an album "Digital Ash in a Digital Urn" you're already asking for a reaming. C'mon. Marrying yourself to such a gloom title that gives the game away, this is bush league by even Hipster poser standards.

The lyrics hold up the ash label, with callow, straining twittish vocals trussing out the usual disenchantments and proclamations, all over a glibly gleeful bouncetronica that makes me want to puke. The few decent tracks on this album are decent because they're rip-offs. Every song has a dozen ancestors, everything as noticable as Ah-Ha and Genesis to early Joy Division and even some Madness in there. But a few draw from enough a disparate source from the method that the results can hold your interest for the track length. "Time Code" is a Rusted Root song, plain and simple, and "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)" is Blink 182, all done up like Devo singles.

Fuck Bright Eyes. I expected better than this. Bob Dylan was transcendant because he had a way of simplifying everything down, condensing everything, such that even a bohemoth like "Hurricane" felt like a quick jaunt of an agit-folk song. And we forgave Bob for not really giving a damn about Ruben, or any of his other "causes", because his art was just so damn good, and absorbing. When Bright Eyes digs through the gloom of better men and turns out this sprawling, high school project of an album, it makes me want to cum fire down the throats of all my contemporaries who are so willing to give this cheap hack a golden crown.

-Z