Conor Oberst has always seemed alternately pulled and repulsed by songwriting as a form of truth-telling. It’s a fascination that often teeters on desperation: ”If I could act like this was my real life and not some cage where I’ve been placed/ Then I could tell you the truth like I used to and not be afraid of sounding fake,” he sang on ‘False Advertisting’, a song off 2002’s Lifted, or, The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground that perfectly encapsulated Bright Eyes‘ lo-fi grandiosity. More than two decades later, ‘Real Feel 105°’, a wistful highlight from their new album Five Dice, All Threes, finds Oberst withdrawn in resignation: “There’s too much to untangle to get to the truth/ I was thinking what I just couldn’t say.” It’s a reminder that while he may be a songwriter who won’t mince his words, he doesn’t always have the clarity or aptitude to put them in order. So the band’s new album, like so many of the ones that came before, appears dazzled even at its most dazzling, honest even when the truth seems far out of grasp.
And the older you grow, Oberst realizes, the further it slips away. “I think time is a strange thing because some things feel like they happened yesterday, and some things feel like they didn’t even happen in your lifetime, or that someone else lived them,” he said in a recent interview. So it follows that every one of his new songs exists in dialogue with the band’s catalog as if it were all written the day before – or never existed in the first place. Musically, Bright Eyes’ 2020 LP Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was acknowledged this by pulling elements from the whole range of their discography, but there were lyrical signs, too. On ‘Nothing Gets Crossed Out’, another track from Lift, Oberst confessed, “I’m just too afraid of all this change,” a sentiment he fought back on their first album since 2011 with lines like “Got to change like your life is depending on it” and “I’m not afraid of the future.”
The predominant feeling on Five Dice, All Three isn’t fear so much as hate in all its forms: stubborn, primal, self-directed and societal. A song actually called ‘Hate’ begins its polemic against religion and ends with AI threatening the art of language, but between it all the singer smuggles a dig at his own occupation, what’s happening right now: “Every single fleeting thought becomes another outlaw song/ One hand on a smoking gun and a bullet in the innocent.” (“What I just couldn’t say,” then, becomes “what I battled in song.”) It’s followed by ‘Real Feel 105°’, which adds another thing to the list: “I hate the moon, but I’d take it from you/ I want anything you have to give,” he sings, which is enough to leave fans wondering if we’ll ever get another Better Oblivion Community Center album. (That song is just one gut-punch after another.) The whole album may be wrapped in the “whistle while you work” mentality of its jaunty lead single, ‘Bells and Whistles’, but when ‘Bas Jan Ader’ makes a chorus out of the famous opening line from Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, it inevitably lands on “It was the worst.”
Oberst won’t outright say he wants to shake off this mortal coil, but he’ll wonder out loud, “How is it that I’m still alive?,” before resolving the next song with “Someday we all die/ Why give into these tiny suicides.” His lyrics seem to flow both freely and self-consciously, giving in to a stream of personal grievances and surreal associations while jerking away from every cliché in the playbook, whether it’s one to wallow or rejoice in. The most anthemic the album gets is in its closing track, ‘Tin Soldier Boy’, which of course happens to also be its most doomful. Oberst takes no pleasure in all of this catastrophizing, though, whether calling out Elon Musk or himself for “feeding on my feed,” which I guess excludes the platform formally known as Twitter.
For all its internal vacillations and despair, Bright Eyes have rarely sounded as vibrant and locked-in as they do on Five Dices, All Threes. Oberst, multi-instrumentalist and producer Mike Mogis, and keyboardist and arranger Nate Walcott favor a loose spontaneity somewhat lacking its predecessor – from the raucous folk-punk of ‘Rainbow Overpass’, featuring Alex Levine (aka Alex Orange Drink) of the So So Glos, to a devastating ballad with the National’s Matt Berninger, ‘Time I Have Left’ – picking themselves back up after each emotional crash. But they also colour the LP with a series of creative flourishes. When Oberst, who also hates “the protest singer staring at me in the mirror,” sings “And the orchestra plays/ A cartoon score for war” on another social diatribe, ‘Trains Still Run on Time’, the band reacts accordingly; distortion screeches at the mention of stadiums, warps itself as heliptocters spin out; and drums slither through ‘All Threes’, a surprisingly jazzy collaboration with Cat Power.
The title of the album is a reference to the game of dice that also serves as one of its two main framing devices. The other is the 1954 Frank Sinatra film Suddenly, which is sampled around the record’s most devastating moments. A bit of dialogue about emotional apathy is inserted amidst the climactic cacophony of ‘Spun Out’, but, through a violent act of decontextualization, the next snippet strikes an even deeper chord. “I used to dream about the crowd once in a while,” Sinatra says. “I used to see all those faces scratching and shoving and biting. And then the mist would clear, and somehow all those faces would be me. All me. And all nothing.” A screen, a quote, a mirror – anything that’ll shoot back your own reflection – might be the closest one can get to whatever’s called truth, the kind of which reverberates in the silence Five Dice, All Threes leaves in its wake.