Bright Eyes
Fevers and Mirrors

THE REVIEW

The fevers you catch just before turning twenty, between high school and university, when changes are reflected in the sudden repulsion towards the old wallpaper you never noticed before; the mirrors in your parents' house that seem to darken with opaque spots while yet another day falls behind you, in the window frame, and the calendar turns with a chilling silence. These are the symbolic references of "Fevers And Mirrors," the work that Conor Oberst, aka Bright Eyes, records in the last months of 1999 with his devoted companions from Saddle Creek. He is nineteen, already has one album and a plethora of scattered material behind him, and here he focuses his attention on the passage of time, the objects in the room, a windswept Omaha, with a faded sky and the same faces. On this disturbing domestic mythology is built, with the consistency of a seasoned artist, the young American's most mysteriously seductive album.

Oberst's quivering and often dissonant voice sounds like that of a troubled convalescent wandering barefoot through the rooms of his house, among porcelain dolls, music boxes, mirrors reflecting masks, credenzas with woodworms, memories besieging drawers, and things. The guitars, already sickly and dusty by themselves, are poisoned by organs, as in the hypnotic "The Calendar Hung Itself...", supported by a whirlwind and dirty rhythm, or in "A Scale, A Mirror And Those Indifferent Clocks", which contrasts a first part of typically Oberstian lo-fi folk with a second part featuring flute and more mature sounds, foreshadowing more recent orchestral moves.

The album is claustrophobic, toxic: "Arienette" stands out for its gloomy atmosphere hanging halfway between Dante's inferno and the misty Scottish moors, while "Sunrise, Sunset" perfectly mimics in rhythm and arpeggio that rise and fall the continuous and repetitive course of the sun and days. The air in Omaha becomes stale, smelling of mothballs. The electric anger of the chorus is in vain, as is the flute that, in the end, anesthetizes the repudiation of daily life through an elegiac melody, reminiscent of the village girl long loved.

There are also more traditionally folk moments, like in "Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh", among the catchiest melodic pieces, or "Something Vague", which proposes a softening of the atmosphere, with flute and accordion. Worth noting is "An Attempt To Tip The Scales", which ends with a long interview with Oberst: among jokes and technical info, an interpretative key for some of the album's symbols is also suggested.

This is precisely the most appreciable aspect of "Fevers And Mirrors": its distinct tone not only musically but also conceptually. One might almost speak of it as a concept album, under the sign of dark, shadowy, suffocating, almost decadent folk, with Bright Eyes singing a new (contemporary) farewell to adolescence, succeeding without clichés, in addition to his usual compositional talent.