On the self-produced Five Dice, All Threes, Bright Eyes embrace the elusive quality that has made them so enduring and influential across generations and genres, bringing their homespun sound from an Omaha bedroom to devoted audiences around the world. In Oberst’s songwriting lies a promise that our loneliest thoughts and feelings can take on grander shapes when passed between friends, blasted through speakers, or shouted among crowds. This time around, the band invites such like-minded voices onto the record with them, with notable guest appearances from Cat Power (“All Threes”), The National’s Matt Berninger (“The Time I Have Left”), and Alex Orange Drink, the frontman of the New York punk band The So So Glos, who co-wrote several songs and shares a climactic verse in the surging “Rainbow Overpass.”
Despite this range of collaborators, Five Dice, All Threes is as confessional and unguarded as Oberst has sounded in years. Throughout these timelessly constructed yet unabashedly modern songs, he earns his place among a rare class of songwriters who have grown more fearless and boundless with age. In the scenic “Bas Jan Ader”—which takes its title from the 20th century Dutch performance artist whose final act found him sailing into the Atlantic Ocean, never to return—his writing traces the course of a bad memory smoothing out to invite the onset of nostalgia. “I never thought I’d see 45,” he sings to a lapping, chiming melody. “How is it that I’m still alive?” For an artist who has explored unflinching questions of mortality since his teen years, the writing on Five Dive, All Threes conveys a new sense of urgency—and empathy, too.
For every striking turn in his lyrics, the band knows just how to complement him. On one level, Five Dice, All Threes may be the most fun album in the Bright Eyes catalog, filled with singalong hooks and buzzing performances. “I think it revisits the spirit of our older records,” Walcott says. “There is a real quality of chaos and ecstatic urgency in the performances.” And yet, sitting alongside these adrenalized rockers that sound beamed in directly from the garage, you will find contemplative, psychedelic material like the heartbreaking “Tiny Suicides” and “All Threes,” a song whose jazzy piano solo and free-associative lyrics feel totally unprecedented in the Bright Eyes catalog.
As per usual, the music comes loaded with subtext that invites deep listening—the signature touch of a band who has always honored the album as its own exalted work of art. In the background of these songs, you can piece together a story about love and fate and identity, stitched together from samples of the 1954 Frank Sinatra film Suddenly, a layered orchestra of people sobbing, and a game of dice that borders on cosmic and lends the album its framing device and winking title. On Five Dice, All Threes, Bright Eyes embrace these beliefs with music that feels thrillingly alive, as if we were all in the room with them, shouting along and gaining the strength to move forward together. It doesn’t just sound like classic Bright Eyes. It sounds like their future, too.
