Old, New Music: Cassadaga

This is the time of year when I get caught up on records I missed and my old new record of the moment is Bright Eyes‘ Cassadaga, released this past spring.
This is an enchanted record. A confessional, grandiose, oratorical, piece of Americana that mixes the pretentious and the personal in the grand, Whitmanesque tradition. It’s full of fiddle hooks, great choruses, and romance in the old school sense.
It’s a record about spiritual renewal named after a century old camp of psychics in central Florida to which our hero has limped after a doomed affair with an older woman (”She said I kissed her different/That all the men her age are mean”) ends with an abortion (”Since the operation I heard you’re breathing just for one”) and a stint in rehab (Cleanse Song).

Well I went back by rented Cadillac and company jetLike a newly orphaned refugee retracing my stepsAll the way to Cassadaga to commune with the deadThey said, “You’d better look alive”And I was off to old Dakota where a genocide sleepsIn the Black Hills, the Badlands, the calloused EastI buried my ballast. I made my peace.Heard Four Winds, leveling the pines
The record alternates between rockers that wheel and lurch on their way to soaring choruses, apparently the work of bass player/guitarist Mike Mogis (think: Rolling Thunder Review) and chamber folk songs intricately orchestrated with woodwinds and percussion by pianist Nate Walcott (think: Five Leaves Left).
But the album’s best music comes from the tumbling overflow of words that pour out of singer-songwriter Conor Oberst’s mouth. Like early Springsteen, classic Bob Dylan, or hell, ol’ Walt himself, Oberst harnesses words for their flow as much as for their meanings, a flow which Oberst achieves through internal rhyme and layers with vivid images:
I keep looking for that blindfold faithlighting candles to a cynical saintwho wants the last laugh at the fly trapped in the windowsill tape
or, later, in Classic Cars:
I made a new cast of the death mask that’s gonna cover my face
Great lines linger in the mind as much as great hooks do (”the whole world loves you if you’re a chic chameleon,” “I felt nauseous with the truth,” “never trust a heart so bent it can’t break”), but there are hooks a plenty (Cleanse Song is as irresistible as Donovan’s There Is a Mountain), and nice melodies too for a folk rock album.
I’m told this is the most polished album of Conor Oberst’s career. It’s a career I haven’t followed. But that’s not unusual, I usually don’t pick up precocious indie rockers until they cast off the lo-fi and make a higher-fi, more mainstream move. Maybe it sounds like selling out to some, but it sounds like buying in to me. At least, I’m buy in. Great album.
(Cross posted at Trickster!)

Source : http://newcritics.com/blog1/2007/10/28/old-new-music-cassadaga/