1) If Winter Ends; 2) Padraic My Prince; 3) Contrast and Compare; 4) The City Has Sex; 5) The Difference in the Shades; 6) Touch; 7) June on the West Coast; 8) Pull My Hair; 9) A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction; 10) Tereza and Tomas / Contrast and Compare (Alternative) [hidden track]
Everyone starts somewhere, and that's the key lesson we're learning here. More promising than consistent, but with a few secret successes.
Key tracks: "Touch", "June on the West Coast", "Pull My Hair"
Letting Off the Happiness ticks all the boxes of a classic emo singer/songwriter record. Conor Oberst - still only 18 here - is verbose with his lyrical melancholy, the mood is intentionally dour and dramatic, and the tempo is kept at the mid-to-low range, ideal for autumnal navelgazing. And it is Oberst's record, through and through: the arrangements are centered around him, everybody clearly playing the backing while he's in the spotlight. The idea of Bright Eyes being Conor Oberst's umbrella project with an ever-changing but frequently appearing set of various collaborators hasn't yet had the chance to really solidify, but even with its Oberst-centrism it's still audible that Letting Off the Happiness was made with the help of a trusty set of comrades in tow. The liner notes detail the accompanying crew, recording locations and minor details on the process for each song, making it clear that a lot of people had input on it and a lot of it seemed to be spontaneous; friends whimsically trading ideas while recording a humble debut with no budget and no expectations. Few of them even get brief moments in front of the microphone.
The curveball that you do not expect whatsoever when pressing play are the unexpectedly prominent synthesizer and keyboard element cutting through most of the album's more traditional singer/songwriter fare. I have this mental image of someone dusting off some cheap synths they found in the corner by happenstance and and their fooling around just happened to find its way on the record while everyone else played things as normal; that's certainly how it comes across, given how at odds the sometimes carefully textural and sometimes unexpectedly erratic keyboard work are with the rest of the album's whispering, confessional mood. It's not something that defines the album per se, but the more you realise they are nearly always around the more they start grabbing the attention. Oberst and co seem to have themselves realised how prominent they were at some point and eventually began to lean onto them more heavily. By the back half of the album you can find "Touch" and "Pull My Hair", two strikingly louder cuts where those synths that have been biding their time in the background take the center stage and everything generally gets a shake-up: The liberated and heaven-reaching, organ-heavy march of "Touch" is no slouch, but "Pull My Hair" in particular has one of Oberst's most honestly hook-driven choruses across his entire back catalogue, and it's both strange and great.
Those synth elements arguably catch one's ear so much because the rest of the album quite doesn't. Letting Off the Happiness is recognisably Bright Eyes, but not quite done yet: Oberst is charismatic and his writing here shows off the same skill set that would characterise his career, but the strength of the songwriting is wildly up and down, and his lyrics are close to a little try-hard on their on-the-nose miserablism. Parts of the album share a little too many building blocks to turn them into anything more than a series of slightly monotonous melancholy. "The Difference in the Shades", "Tereza and Tomas". "Padraic My Prince" and "Contrast and Compare" (featured twice, with a vaguely alternative version hidden at the end of the album) are all wallowing, grayscale moodpieces that have some individual quirks each but which have lumped into one vague notion of a song if you try to think about them after the album: out of the lot "Padraid My Prince" jumps out the most as a song, but it sounds like a prototype for a lot of early Bright Eyes songs (it could go for an early concept sketch for "Lover I Don't Want to Love", or am I the only one hearing that?). Meanwhile the ear-piercing chimes of "Tereza and Tomas" are memorably for an entirely different reason, spicing the otherwise perfectly alright moody closer in a way that indicates that maybe not every whim suggestion was for the best.
When Letting Off the Happiness strays away from the midtempo anti-anthems into one direction or another, the album finds its best sides. Besides "Pull My Hair" and "Touch", the other two key tracks here are "If Winter Ends" and "June on the West Coast" are both largely just Oberst and his guitar, but they nail the intimate sentiment the rest of the album tries to go for; I feel like I'm railing a lot on Oberst's tropes in this review but I do consider him one of my all time favourite songwriters, and despite his youth it's the stripped-down cuts like these two that show how he can be such a charismatic scene-setter, and in particular the spitting fervour of "If Winter Ends" gets near exhilarating towards the end. "The City Has Sex" has a rock and roll swerve that sounds reinvigorating just because of its energy - it's a bright and raucous little number that injects a little life into the otherwise quite phlegmatic first half. "A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction" is the arrow sign pointing towards the subsequent Bright Eyes releases, showing off a more dynamic way to brew the formula here - after an album full of nervous first steps, it's here where it really clicks how this record forms part of the Bright Eyes continuum.
It's an on-album reminder of the only real actual issue that Letting Off the Happiness has: that Fevers and Mirrors exists, which effectively takes everything this album has but betters it in every shape and form. This is after all, and excluding the various sets of early tape recordings, Oberst's first album, and at a very young age at that. Rough spots are to be expected, everyone is still young and green, and there's nothing here that a little more experience and refinement wouldn't be able to turn into gold. A part of that translates into a certain charm, definitely, but a lot of the album's successes feel like strokes of luck rather than anything knowingly skilled. If you take it at that face value, it's easier to enjoy Letting off the Happiness as how it is: an uneven if pleasant set of glorified bedroom takes, wild shots into the unknown, first takes of potential winning ideas and a few unexpected home runs. Everything else Oberst would set out to do would build from here, most imminently on the very next album that followed - and that leaves Letting Off the Happiness on the side of the road or on the record shelf. It's obvious that its creator would go on to do great things, but there's still a distance to run from here.
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