REVIEW: The Peoples Key by Bright Eyes

Bright Eyes
The Peoples Key
(out of 5)

Religion is everywhere. We swim in it whether we can accept the fact or not. From frustrated middle-aged woman and their half-baked soft-Buddhism, to book-selling Hare Krishnas on K Road, to atheist-bogan flatmates who have an odd attachment to the dated conspiracy film Zeitgeist - religion escapes no man.

It is a way of explaining the world we inhabit; it underpins our political systems; it even defines the way we understand ‘love’, romantic or otherwise. Yesterday, Christians the world over, (including this one), celebrated the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who, in an ironic turn of events, defeated death by actually dying. It is one take of many; and the poppy field of religious world views has been the mine of artists for millennia.

Conor Oberst is a songwriter who has spent a career poeticising the all-time divisive topics of religion and spirituality, and the lived-out realities which emerge from them (from soup kitchens to suicide bombers). Notable records through Obert’s moniker Bright Eyes include, country/folk modern classic 'I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning' (2005), the electronic turns of 'Digital Ash in a Digital Urn' (2005), and the carefully orchestrated 'Cassadaga' (2007). Each display diverse strokes of musical genius and each explore the explosive connections between religion, politics and the fragility of human relationships.

Oberst’s latest effort, The People’s Key, continues along this line, amalgamating science fiction fantasy with visceral clarity to build a religious opus of his own. The record begins with some guru-shaman espousing a kind of new age creation myth, pinching ideas from genuine historical texts, and a fair few Marvel comic-books-turned-films it seems (“so the Sumerian tablets say the same thing as Genesis said: chariots of fire that came into the sky and beings got out of them...???” etc.)

The postmodern mish-mash is profoundly confusing, and personifies, through another man’s digitally manipulated voice, Oberst’s own grappling with the tough questions that taunt us all. The narration quickly fades into the songwriter’s enigmatic philosophising. He does his “best to sleep through the caterwaul”, which I assume is the insanity he feels haunts the place. This interplay between new-age narrative and song tightly holds the album together, revealing the artist’s cosmo-spiritual interests and very human longing for something greater.

In this regard, it makes sense that the lyrics throughout the album make reference to content as diverse as Rastafarian lore ('Haile Salassie'), hard-Buddhism in 'Jejune Stars', a plane crash, the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun, and the ‘deux de machina’ in 'A Machine Spiritual (In the People’s Key)', post-modernism, as realised in 'Approximate Sunlight' (“used to dream of time machines/now it’s been said we’re post everything”), and the odd coupling between pagan goddess worship and the Holy Trinity in 'Triple Spiral'. In softly, softly piano track, 'Ladder Song', disbelief in Jacob’s Ladder (“no one knows where the ladder goes”) and references to Paul Simon’s 'Boy In a Bubble' (“lights from the jungle to the sky”) subtly rear their head as the songwriter bares his bones to the maybe-meaningless world.

Bright Eyes - Shell Games

Launching through this obsessive librarian’s knowledge is the relatively simple (and standout) track of the record, 'Shell Games', with its guilty self-reflection (“forgive myself for the many times/ I was cruel to something helpless and weak”, I’m still angry with no reason to be”), and its utterly hopeful sing-a-long chorus. “Here it come that heavy love!”. It’s a straight-up pop song, and will get you singing, if not dancing happily about your room.

Bright Eyes has always been one of the more despondent artists on my regular-rotate list, so it was rather surprising to find The People’s Key ending on a positive note. Final track, 'One for You, One for Me', is the closest thing resembling a U2 stadium anthem you will ever hear from this artist. The song details the distances we create between people who are not like us (“How did we get so far away from us?”) From “the billionaires”, to the poor, to the powers-that-be and the people who may suffer under them, the lines are drawn, dehumanising us, pulling us away from where we are meant to be. The artist concludes that “’you and me’...is an awful lie”, that it should actually be “I and I”.

If we could strip away the surface differences we might just see that we are essentially the same. The deranged shaman-guru narrating the record gets it (“well the transit is of love, it goes back to love again”). Maybe one day we will too.

Written by Theo Sangster.