Bright skies ahead

In case you haven't heard, Bright Eyes is the brainchild of one Conor Oberst — the creative mastermind behind the project. And just in case you haven't heard the buzz, know that Bright Eyes has been making waves in the music world since the release of not one, but two highly anticipated albums on the 25th of January. The first — "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning" — is this week's choice pick.

Now before we go on, I'd like to get one "minor" detail out of the way: simply that Oberst is a mere 24 years of age and on more than one occasion has been pegged as the "Second Coming of Bob Dylan." But how impressive is that? After all, it's not really a big deal that Oberst first caught major critical acclaim 10 years ago and in Nebraska, no less.

It's also probably not worth mentioning that these two releases make it six albums in six years for the young singer-songwriter, who has also shared the stage with The Boss and Michael Stipe. It took Dylan 20 years to take over the Village and 22 years to drop Freewheelin.'

What's Oberst got? All right, enough already: it's impressive, this guy is the real deal, he's got the gift and this album is the latest proof.

"Wide Awake" is a tour through Oberst's burgeoning musical intellect and a testament to his poetic aptitude. And in the Dylan-Woody Guthrie sense of the word, it is raw and unabashedly folky. Listen close: the wavering shakiness in Oberst's voice is in no way a weakness, but a trait that exudes honesty, sentimentality and a passion for the real.

Like soft brushstrokes, his lyrics paint the visual accompaniment of his guitar strum, tending masterfully toward the picturesque. On several tracks, Oberst posits himself as a camera lens, a "painter in a cave," one bound to the poet's fate as recorder of life's happenings. What is more folk than that?

Admittedly, Oberst's vocal inflections occasionally map from track to track and his pitch and tone shifts are nearly identical, but his assortment of backing vocalists helps balance his pieces. Emmylou Harris — Dylan's own collaborator in the Desire sessions — appears in brilliant form on three songs, complementing Oberst's murmur with her own uniquely high-end modulations.

Her contributions are wildly detached from the main vocal track, yet they are universally harmonious and range in effect from single-line refrains ("We Are Nowhere and It's Now") to song-length backings, complete in their own right ("Land Locked Blues").

On the whole, the album offers a wide variety of folk tunes, each with its own subtleties. Certain tracks on "Wide Awake" reveal a definitive country influence. Pedal steel inclusions on "Old Song (for the New World Order)" and "Train Under Water" highlight this fact as they draw on the alternative twang of early Wilco.

"Lua" is a beautifully lonely track featuring Oberst and his guitar, delicate and uncompromised. "Land Locked Blues" — my personal favorite — is five minutes of flowing descriptive verse, refrain-less in the spirit of folk purity, and sporting a cleverly sampled military funeral toll.

Rounding out the collection is "Road to Joy," a chaotic track that explodes in the final minutes and culminates with Oberst unexpectedly screaming the album's title reference with rock star bravado

While Oberst's creations lack the reserved genius of Dylan's later work, Oberst nevertheless exhibits a potential nearly unmatched by his peers. There's more to come, so watch out for this guy.