Bright Eyes - A Christmas Album (2002)

1) Away in a Manger; 2) Blue Christmas; 3) Oh Little Town of Bethlehem; 4) God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen; 5) The First Noël; 6) Little Drummer Boy; 7) White Christmas; 8) Silent Night; 9) Silver Bells; 10) Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas; 11) The Night Before Christmas

The Christmas record for anyone who lost their presents and who are now drinking mulled wine all by themselves in their cold apartment.

Key tracks: "Blue Christmas", "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" / "The Night Before Christmas"

A lot of people seem to regard this as the world's most depressing Christmas album, or something along those lines; one of my friends memorably described the version of "Little Drummer Boy" as the only Christmas song that's made him want to slit his wrists. But I don't think that's quite the right take for this. No one who wants to make something genuinely sad decides that the best way to go about it is a Christmas album, especially wholly one made out of seasonal classics. Playing festive tunes in minor scales and downbeat tempos isn't something you do just for the sake it it, it's a conscious twisting of the familiar melodies. It might just be my skewed understanding of what sad is (thanks, years of emo white guys with guitars in my CD player) but mopey as it may be, the Bright Eyes Christmas album is hilarious in its wallowing. It sounds like Oberst taking his reputation as a depressing singer/songwriter and deciding to have a laugh with it, by creating a Christmas album so over-the-top in its moodiness it's borderline comedic. I don't know the true story behind the album's creation, but given he included a self-ridiculing fake interview just a few albums back, being a little cheeky about his own sound is par on course by now.

Besides, the sadsack Christmas tunes are only one facet of A Christmas Album. There's a decent amount of variety across the songs here: the electronically buzzing version of "Little Drummer Boy" sounds like a sneak preview of Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" stomps like an angry reindeer, "Blue Christmas" has a lithe country twang to it, "Silver Bells" is a Sufjan Stevens Christmas song before those became a thing. Oberst is also far from the only singer on the album and on some tracks he doesn't say a word, his friends getting the spotlight - unfortunately the album's credits are very vague in terms of direct crediting, but many of the women assisting Oberst with the vocal duties across the album have gentle warm voices, perfect for the ideal cosy Christmas evening. When Oberst and his friends do jump into the black Christmas tree territory, it's pretty good in all honesty. "Silent Night", "The First Noel", "Away in a Manger", etc all work really well with a frown on their face, and as established before, are actually rather entertaining in their melodrama.

It's hard to understand how these could be considered genuinely sad but if you don't find the tongue in the cheek here, there's really little here to savour completely on musical terms alone. It is after all just a brief set of old school evergreens: no matter what you do with them, you're never going to get anything you haven't really heard before. There's no left-field deep cuts or any Bright Eyes originals either, as enticing as an idea of a true Oberst Christmas carol sounds like. That said, the version of "Blue Christmas" is now a mainstay in my Christmas mixtapes because it nails the recipe while having a really solid performance and arrangement behind it: its hint of the blues is present but not without going too far, reaching for that gentle wistfulness that a lot of really good Christmas songs have going on for them. The biggest surprise though, and my actual favourite part of the record, lies right at the end. The stark piano-and-cello version of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" is honestly beautiful on its own, but it then segues into an orchestrally flaired, comfortingly narrated reading of "The Night Before Christmas". It closes the record in a beautiful and unexpected manner, and it manages to conjure a little magic in as it captures that very special Christmas feeling completely genuinely: it's the Hollywood camera pan-out from Oberst's moody den to the pristinely white winter wonderland outside, snow gently falling to the ground, as the credits roll in.

I get why this can be so divisive, but the whole concept of "early-period Bright Eyes doing a Christmas album" should be a dead giveaway of what's in store, and taking it at face value misses the target entirely. If you're like me and you love both Christmas as well as mopey emo singer/songwriters, this is a delight - it's also a great contrast to so many other indie Christmas albums, which ensures that this gets wheeled out every year (much to the misery of the people I've lived with), especially during the days when all you get is another downpour of rain instead of snow. Plus, it's funny... or I'm just really disjointed myself, either or.

Rating: 7/10

Bright Eyes - Letting Off the Happiness (1998)

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.

Rating: 6/10