The band name Bright Eyes inspired immediate mistrust. It conveyed shoe-gazing egotism and a kind of phoney introversion peddled by spoiled suburbanites on college campuses. Maybe that's why Conor Oberst retired the moniker in 2011 and decided to double down on solo albums. ‘Salutations’ is his third since the band split, and his eighth in total.
But it doesn't contain many new songs. Instead, ‘Salutations’ has full-band arrangements of tracks from his 2016 acoustic offering, ‘Ruminations’, with a few additions thrown in. As such, it represents a fresh way of presenting newish music - perhaps inspired by Ryan Adams’ indie reworking of Taylor Swift’s ‘1989’ - and an apparent ‘quantity over everything’ release strategy. It's an approach that many artists appear to have adopted in the era of streaming services.
The record's main problem is that while Oberst’s lyrics are often wonderful - idiosyncratic and poetic in equal measure - the sound of ‘Salutations’ is fairly indistinct from that of similar acts. Americana bards such as Father John Misty, Kurt Vile and the aforementioned Adams seem to do the same thing better.
That said, there is some truly fine work here. The arrangements of Afterthought and Too Late to Fixate illuminate the shambolic fun of Oberst’s storytelling, while his lyrics are frequently raucous, romantically adventurous and laced with humour, with a story about a prostitute ending: “You know I don’t mind the money/It beats betting on sports/And though it might get expensive/It’s cheaper than divorce.”
Other memorable cuts include Napalm and A Little Uncanny, both of which namecheck the heroes (and anti heroes) of Oberst's spiralling imagination. On the latter, he satirises Ronald Reagan's appeal brilliantly: “He thought trial by fire was America's fate/He made a joke of the poor people, and that made him a saint.” But the lyrics are less convincing when he talks about missing the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Oliver Sacks and Sylvia Plath. It somehow implies an incomplete understanding of their work. Hitchens’ writing, in particular, feels so literary that to march it out in a pop song seems to miss the point.
All the best songs on ‘Salutations’ are also on ‘Ruminations’, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t listen to it. It’s an album that humorously and thoughtfully repackages good work. But it doesn’t really illuminate hidden depths, instead offering a considered reappraisal of something that nearly (but didn't quite) set the world on fire the first time around. Actually, 'Salutations' is a bit like Oberst's evolution from Bright Eyes. It’s a legitimate rebrand, but a rebrand nonetheless.
Conor Oberst Upcoming Tour Dates are as follows:
Fri August 18 2017 - LONDON KOKO
Mon August 21 2017 - LIVERPOOL O2 Academy Liverpool
Tue August 22 2017 - GLASGOW O2 ABC Glasgow
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