Bright Eyes - Four Winds (Universal)
4/5
By: Alex Lee Thomson
You have to admire anybody that has the bollocks to get up in their own video sporting a Jack White-style haircut and allow people to throw debris at them in disgust for what they're hearing... luckily, the song's not as bad as the faux audience would have you believe, in fact it's pretty darn ace...
When Conor Oberst's collective project Bright Eyes switched from his own independent label Saddle Creek to some big company in the sky we were all a little stunned and confused, and when you hear the new material it does have a vague wash across it that only a major sound would. But for all the indie-junkies harshly screaming "sell out" across venues the length and breadth of Europe there are people realising that what Bright Eyes, or Conor, is actually doing is some of the more focused and minded work of his career.
There are two sides to Bright Eyes, country & folk and indie rock 'n' roll; this track follows the first of these limits though doesn't tie itself down to a strict 'Americana' sound like a lot of his contemporaries would do. There's certainly more Neil Young than Bob Dylan in this and it works all the better for it, becoming subtle and fanciful over a hard edged folk ballad that would ordinarily have Conor erratically preaching until his voice cracked. Four Winds shows him as an awesome vocalist as well as breathtaking songwriter and with a first single this inspiring we can only imagine, until our eye balls pop out of our heads from squeezing them so tightly, what the new album will have for us.
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