“I studied your work like architecture

Cathedral of words, the meaning’s not easy to tell/

Comes back around on itself”

So sang Conor Oberst on Bright Eyes’ 2021 comeback album Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was, a concession of lyrical knottiness that perhaps summed up why that record, the cult-favourite folk-rock outfits first in 13 years, failed to reach beyond the band’s longtime entrenched fandom: a polished and ornate yet overheated, emotionally removed comeback album from a band that once shook its audiences with unsparing proximity and honesty. That polish has vanished on the follow-up Five Dice, All Three’s a collection of smoky and unvarnished songs co-written by Alex Orange Drink. That emo intensity core to the Bright Eyes experience is still there, but with a now unrefined sound that recalls the communal, hectic energy of 2000’s Lifted, or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep your Ear to the Ground, and 2005’s Im Wide Awake It’s Morning (his voice savagely cracks open in a way that recalls those records, too.)  But it shares something of a late-period agenda with Sufjan Steven’s recent Javelin, which paid homage to the disparate sonic eras of Stevens’ discography; the motorway Americana of Cassadaga (2007) (not to mention Oberst side projects like Monsters of Folk and The Mystic Valley Band) is evident in the marching gait of El Capitan, and the warped digital effects of 2005’s Digital Ash in a Digital Urn appear on Spun Out and the Matt Berninger duet The Time I Have Left. The harmonica that made Oberst’s solo record Ruminations such a joy returns, as do the orchestral flourishes of Down In The Weeds and Cassadaga, courtesy of long-time bandmate and composer Nate Walcott, but are more restrained, here, usually rising out of the smoky guitar sonics with a welcome spiral of strings or plume of brass, complimenting the rock’n’roll rather than interrupting it in a way that the previous record did. The haphazard style benefits the album, feeling less conceptual (regardless of the Classic Hollywood audio samples that are littered throughout) and, more-to use a dirty word-  raw. And unlike Steven’s Javelin, Five Dice is no helpful introductory album to the band- whereas Stevens’ album was accessible, the songwriting is as indulgent and thorny as ever; economical but never mainstream.

As for Oberst himself, he has always been riveting when he loses control. Corrupt politicians, liquor and Mid-West porches, references to suicide- classic Bright Eyes symbols are all here, but even in the depths of despair he’s having a lot more fun with his back to a wall. In fact, after years of discourse over the lifeblood of the band, it’s relieving to hear him threaten to kill Elon Musk “ n an alley over five dice” on the jazzy All Three’s, featuring Cat Power. His rhymes are simpler; the songwriting direct, but he can still jolt with an inspired detail, such as the desperate sounding Tiny Suicides (when you look into my eyes do you see a scarry night?”) or just make you laugh (Bells and Whistles shares the self-deprecating mid-life crisis energy of Weeds’ standout Forced Convalescence). And on Hate, he simply lists various political and religious figures he despises over an unembellished piano and drum combination before electric guitars offer a way out of the “sadistic hallelujah”.

Elsewhere, Oberst is full of self-reflection, referencing old songs of his; Poison Oak’s canary in a coal mine reappears on El Capitan: when he sings “you can’t say I didn’t warn you/ or prepare you for the afterlife”, the intended recipient could be himself- the guy who was just self-aware enough to never buy into the prodigal-son, next-best-thing immortality that being called the next Bob Dylan in your early 20s must sell to you. The man who famously wrote When The President Talks to God now sings that he “hates the protest singer staring at me in the mirror”; life’s disappointments have caught up with him, none more painful than the revelation that art doesn’t change the world. It’s hard not to think of lines from 2007’s country-inspired Cassadaga :

“The squatters made a mural of a Mexican girl

With fifteen cans of spray paint in a chemical swirl

She’s standing in the ashes at the end of the world

Four winds blowing through her hair”

If Oberst, fifteen years later, feels like he let that young girl down in his trajectory as a supposedly prescient truth-teller of America, the end result whirling through Five Dice, All Threes isn’t a lack of conviction or motivation, but a compelling, unrelenting commitment to being clear-eyed that is hard to look away from.