Album Review: Five Dice, All Threes by Bright Eyes

"I hate, the Puritans / I hate, Mary Magdalene / I hate the way she washed his feet, they still called her a whore / Jesus Christ, I hate you now and I hated you before…I hate, Vishnu / I hate, the Hari Krishna / David Koresh, Jim Jones, and Buddha / I hate this twisted logic, this sadistic hallelujah. " Hate is the air that breathes through Bright Eyes' Five Dice, All Threes. Though this hate is dressed in fears of growing old, banjo fiddling, imagery of New York and L.

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On Five Dice, All Threes, he leans into it, letting chance and emotional rawness guide the sound of another classic Bright Eyes record. Here, Oberst grapples with the existential crises that pervade much of his work, but this time from a place of maturity - or perhaps a more acute, albeit jaded, awareness of time passing and things changing beyond his control. Having witnessed the evolution of indie music firsthand, he remains its melancholic poet laureate, even as artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Adrianne Lenker have carried forward the torch of confessional songwriting.

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The eleventh studio album by Bright Eyes judders into life the same way as the ten that preceded it; awkwardly. Conor Oberst and company seem to revel in kicking things off obliquely, and this time around we get a blend of field recordings and studio chatter that does little to give away what might be coming next. The last Bright Eyes record, 'Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was', was their first in nearly a decade and, in many ways, sounded like it; it was a sprawling work that was stylistically undisciplined and sounded like Conor and his core collaborators, Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott, were spilling as many of their pent-up ideas into the mix as possible, just in case they never got to make another one.

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