News-Letter

"Would you agree times have changed?" is the retort of Conor Oberst, at the end of Cassadaga's first track, to all the Bob Dylan comparisons he's been getting the past couple of years. But it is also a question that recalls current events -- war, religious fanaticism and global warming -- and throws them up into a tornado blowing across a superstitious America. The eye of this storm is over Cassadaga, a small community in Florida notable for its population of clairvoyants.

The words of mediums and séances across the folk culture of the United States flow in a stream-of-consciousness style that is less direct and personal than previous Bright Eyes albums, while the production has gotten notably smoother. Gone are the rough cuts on bedroom microphones, as are the distortion and clipping of unprocessed recordings. Bright Eyes is now making a full-fledged pop album, with the sleek every-track-in-a-different-style production to prove it.

The album begins with what sounds like radio show, a female psychic with an optimistic Middle-American accent talking about Cassadaga being where you are going to find the center of energy and of "getting rid of the old feelings and the old ways of thinking" over a discordant orchestra. This psychic energy motif appears in numerous places across the album as do various other motifs of dead civilizations of grandeur, the four directions of the map and of being caught in the in between. Western civilization comes crashing down in the chorus of the first single "Four Winds" with the prophecy, "When Great Satan's gone, the whore of Babylon ... she caves".

This richness of apocalyptic imagery can also be seen in the dreamy half-asleep line of "Cities encircled in iron / on a great silver beltway, democracy's shackled hands" which is uttered towards the end of the album before an Arabic vocal track floats in, as if the winds of the Middle East have blown through the New Jersey Turnpike. My only gripes are that the lyrics can at times be frustratingly vague and blunt the full power of Oberst's famously personal confessions and that the song "Soul Singer in a Session Band" should have been a B-side, but all of the other twelve songs are poignant and essential.

The Bright Eyes of Cassadaga has been through 2007 and seen the same collapse of space and time before, or as Oberst says himself, "The wind when it blows is older than Rome and all of this sorrow/See the new pyramids down in old Manhattan/from the roof of a friend's I watched an empire ending."

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