Bright Eyes Digital Ash In A Digital Urn CD

Bright Eyes: Conor Oberst (acoustic guitar, Wurlitzer piano, bass guitar); Sabrina Duim (harp); Jason Boesel, Clark Baechle.
Personnel: Andy Leverett (vocals, guitar, keyboards, programming); Conor Oberst (vocals, piano, Wurlitzer organ, keyboards, sampler); Stella Mogis, Marcia Ann Taylor (vocals); Mike Mogis (guitar, Wurlitzer organ, keyboards, timpani, chimes, Theremin); Nicolas Zinner (guitar, keyboards); Sabrina Duim (harp); Kimberly Salistean, Donna Carnes (violin); Thomas Kluge (viola); Karen Becker (cello); Jiha Lee (flute); Nate Walcott (trumpet); Nick White (keyboards); Jason Boesel (drums, percussion); Clark Baechle (drums); Jimmy Tamborello (programming).
Additional personnel: Nick Zinner (vocals).
Audio Mixer: Mike Mogis.
Digital Ash in a Digital Urn is designed to be the musical polar opposite to the simultaneously-released I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, to be the ambitious, modernistic electronic record that stands in contrast to the sepia-toned, classicist acoustic LP. The production and arrangements may have changed, but Conor Oberst's preference to lyrics over music remains the same. Nevertheless, there is more variety and dynamicism on Digital Ash, which makes it a more interesting listen than its companion, even if it's hard not to escape the feeling that the album is Bright Eyes' take on the Postal Service's Give Up. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
When writing about Conor Oberst, the singer/songwriter who records with an ever-changing group of musicians under the name Bright Eyes, it's customary to state his age within the first few sentences of the piece. It is also not uncommon to read comparisons between this Nebraskan singer/songwriter and Bob Dylan, the best-known singer/songwriter to hail from the Midwest. This serves a specific purpose -- to establish a context for Oberst's songwriting, to imply that he's some kind of "genius," not in the least for writing and recording albums at such a young age, particularly since he's been recording since the age of 13. And so many albums, too! Taking a page from the Robert Pollard handbook, he equates prolificacy with profoundness, releasing multiple records each year, sometimes under different band names. All these pop critic clichés repeated ad infinitum in the new millennium's overheated media circuit settled into conventional wisdom not long after the release of his fourth proper album, Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, in 2002. Positive reviews, all praising his ambition, endless lyrics, and apparent sincerity, flowed in and a cult started to form around Oberst. By 2004, he was nearly inescapable, appearing everywhere from The O.C. -- where Lifted was part of the Seth Cohen Starter Pack -- to representing the younger generation on Moveon.org's Vote for Change tour (which could be a reason why John Kerry couldn't motivate collegiate voters), culminating in Bright Eyes suddenly and surprisingly topping the Billboard singles charts with two singles.
All this set the stage for the release of a pair of new Bright Eyes albums in the first weeks of 2005: the acoustic-based I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning and the electronic-inflected Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. The timing is no accident: big albums are rarely released in the musical graveyard of January, so Oberst had no competition for headlines this time around. He was in every magazine, from Rolling Stone to Newsweek, and the reviews were uniformly positive, trotting out all the familiar "gifted youth" and "next Dylan" boilerplate, but this time, there was a difference. Most reviews were written from the perspective that it was taken for granted that this kid sure was a genius, the next great rock & roll star. It was as if standing on-stage with Michael Stipe and Bruce Springsteen in the fall of 2004 was tantamount to Oberst inheriting their throne as rock statesmen, even if his music has little, if anything, to do with that of R.E.M. or the BossRolling Stone (No. 966, pp.57-8) - 3 stars out of 5 - "[O]nce it gets going, it's phenomenal, with OMD-style guitar and keyboard hooks..."
Uncut (pp.72-3) - 4 stars out of 5 - "Like fine pop writers before him, Oberst's simply wrestling with something troubling he feels thick in the air."
Alternative Press (p.81) - 5 stars out of 5 - "[R]iskier but not totally out of character; it's the more holistic right brain to WIDE AWAKE's rational left brain."