Customer Reviews

Collection of Songs

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Do not buy this album if:
-you cannot stand lo-fi music
-have never heard bright eyes before
-have heard Conor Oberst's other material and already decided that you cannot tolerate his voice (because his voice is worse in this album)

Buy this album if:
-you already know and love Conor Oberst
-are more of a "words person" than a "music person". I havent heard the two albums he just came out with, but excluding those since i cannot judge them, "Lifted" is his best musically. It is argueable if this is his best lyrically, but I think it is his most intimate.
-buy this album even if you have emo-allergies. I cannot stand 99% of anything that would remotely be classified under "emo" except for this, which most would agree could be call "emo-folk" with more emphasis on the "folk" than the "emo".
-you think that the idea of a guy recording on a four-track in his basement is cool.

I understand that many people will not like this album. And I understand why, but i personally love it, and many other people will too. If my opinion was the only one that mattered I would have given it a 5 star rating, rather than a 4 star.

i feel compelled to comment on the reviewer above and his naive, if not misguided, offering. this early collection of work to come from mr. oberst was not originally planned to be released and one might view this as luck on "our" part. these were songs penned and sung at an age when most of his contemporaries where just learning what long division was. his voice and musical arrangements are clearly not developed enough to reach the high standard his fans hold him to today, as is obvious in the review above, but they showcase conor's unmisktable talent being born so early. at the age of thirteen he sings about moments i, at twenty-one, can only hope to experience let alone put into words. while i do recommend aquainting oneself with his more sought after LPs, this is a real treat for any true bright eyes fan. and as a related sidenote, if you have not yet had the pure orgasmic experience of catching a live show please do yourself the favor. no distance is too great to have your paradigm shifted.
[edited to say: for a limited time at saddle-creek.com you can order a christmas album done by Bright Eyes & Co. The 11 or so songs are traditionally what you would expect a christmas album to contain but they all have that saddle creek kick to them thanks to such excellent production. All the proceeds go to the Nebraska Aids Charity and this album is exclusive to the website (i.e., not going to be anywhere else.) This will, i am sure, become a collector's item so go support a good cause and get some groovy tunes out of it.]

I'm a huge fan of Bright Eyes so of course I loved this album. I wouldn't recommend it to everyone, as I consider Bright Eyes to be more of an acquired taste than anything. This album in particular took a while to grow on me. A lot of people don't like Conor's voice, and I didn't really like it when I first heard it, but it really grew on me and now he is one of my favorites. About this album, the recording is really low quality (it was recorded... in his basement!) and...well, he was really young when he recorded these songs. Before you judge him too harshly, these songs were recorded when he was 15 or 16 years old. I like a lot of the songs on this album. Some of them aren't that great, admittedly.

There are some really great songs on here like 'Patient Hope in New Snow', 'Saturday as Usual', 'Falling out of love at this volume', 'Puella quam amo est pulchra', 'a celebration upon completion', 'All of the Truth', 'Lila', and 'Feb. 15th'. I like this album and I would recommend it to anyone who was already a big fan of Bright Eyes' later work. I think you would have to be a fan already to be able to appreciate this album. When I consider how young he was when this was recorded, I'm impressed.

The other great thing about this CD is the review printed on the CD itself.

having just purchased "fevers and mirrors" and "everyday, everynight" at my local record store, i was in a dizzy, entoxicated state of bright eyes enthusiasm when i got online to purchase more albums. i seriously thought that this conor oberst character was incapable of creating anything less than heartbreaking, skull tingling, schizophrenic works of genius. this album seemed a terrible exception on first listen. the mere inadiquicy of the recording quality grated my ears. the whole production sounded like it was written, mixed, mastered and produced in a 24 hour period with a casio and a hand held tape recorder.

but being the open minded music enthusiast that i am, i put the thing on tape and forced myself to listen to it on my delivery routes. after several days, a warm intimacy with the shotty recording began to seep into my ears. tracks like "falling out of love at this volume" contain a pop sweetness that cannot be ignored, and one remembers the power of bright eyes lies not in the recording but in the grated passionate inflection and creativity in conor oberst's voice.

if you are a hardcore bright eyes fan, i recomend adding this album to your collection...there are at least several tracks you'll be glad you got your hands on.

if you've never heard bright eyes, i would definitely recomend starting with "fevers and mirrors" or "letting off the happiness" since these albums pack a much more powerfull punch.

i've been a fan of saddle creek artists for years but living in england has made it hard to buy the albums/lps. and so with this being conor's least famous (if that's the correct word) release, i bought this after every other major full length or ep. by that time bright eyes had been my favourite band for a long time. i think this is why i'm able to appreciate this collection so much. only after having an album or a two for a few months are you able to appreciate conor's voice. some people will always hate it. but i think if you can relate to his music well enough you come to actually prefer his voice being so scratchy and yet full at times.

and let's be fair here - the kid was between the ages of 15 and 17 when he recorded these things. personally, i love the anologue crapness you get from early 4 track recordings, and i love that here is a kid experimenting with instruments he's not a pro at playing. maybe i love it because i'm 16 myself and respect everything that conor does, or maybe some of the songs truly are just brilliant in that teenager sort of way. i also like the quirkiness of how he put a horrible review of it on the front of the cd. to me that sort of means if you dont like bright eyes that's fine; conor sort of likes that at times.

whatever it is, i recommend only buying this album if and when you're acquainted with bright eyes already and even then just give it a chance because it might take a while. it's possible to get used to the poor quality recording and start to like that about it. give it a go if you like 'when the curious girl realizes she is under glass' fevers and mirrors version.

and just remember his age. nobody said this was a masterpiece.

I'm sick of hearing that this Bright Eye's album: A collection of songs is an acquired taste. Nothing about it is acquired except maybe acquiring the money to buy this beautiful record. Conor Oberst's voice is perfection, each slight change in tone perpetuates a completely new and raw emotion. Mind you much of the time those emotions aren't the cheeriest, but thats whats great about this album. Misery loves company, so when you feel a bit crappy its a great friend. ie. in feb 15 he sings 'but i guess that its typical to cling to memories you'll never get back again and to sort through old photographs of a summer long ago or a friend you used to know'. screw sorting through the pics of old pals just bring out this album and get ready to make a new friend.

I'm not entirely sure if Conor Oberst intended for this album to turn out the way it did, but certainly the way i viewed it was that he is this really incredible poet, who focuses mainly on making his words come alive. The way he presents this album in the way that its not recorded really professionally and his singing voice isn't really carefully mastered, you can feel it vividly almost like he's just playing to himself one of those songs that is about trying to make yourself cry.. When your screaming and strumming until you don't even know what your singing its just words inside of you that express all these feelings. Thats what i feel when i sing along. If you reach for a glass of water and discover dure in drinking it that its actually white wine, you will probably spit it out. Not to say that you don't like white wine, you just weren't expecting it.

this album deserves a 5, mainly because its just beautiful. if you can get over the static of the songs, and really listen. which really isnt that hard. its early stuff, recorded in his basement. personally, my favorites on the album are "saturday as usual", "falling out of love at this volume", "one straw (please)" and the best of all "february fifteenth"

A lot of people pass Conor Oberst off as another whiny emo boy.Whiny though he may be, he is brilliant.Bright Eyes is the type of band that grows on you.Listen to them with an open mind, listen to the lyrics, the passion.It's how music should be.Just because it's not about pimping hoes and wearing bling-bling doesn't mean it's not worth listening to!

The intro instrumental stands as a pretty cool jam to start this cd off. The rest of the album is obviously a low-fi recording that conor and friends pretyt much did from their basement/garage. It's good if you love his voice, but for my tastes the predominatly acoustic tracks are a little too slow. I love Bright Eyes' work, but this is the weakest of it in my opinion. Don't buy it first if your just getting into BE, buy F and M or a newer album first.