On their new album, Bright Eyes come to terms with maturity

Five Dice, All Threes

Bright Eyes (ARC, 2024)

On Five Dice, All Threes, Bright Eyes serves up one of their most conceptually coherent albums in years. With 10 LPs in the rearview and nearly three decades of collaboration to their name, Bright Eyes even makes being tired sound lively.

“I never thought I’d see 45 / How is it that I’m still alive?” front man Conor Oberst wonders on “Bas Jan Ader,” an upbeat, lyrically dense romp that wraps wordplay and literary allusion in dynamic and satisfying instrumentation. Like previous records, Five Dice, All Threes opens with a track that’s more soundscape than song. Alongside clattering dice, spliced dialogue from vintage film, production noise, and ambient recordings, “Five Dice” vaguely teases the album’s themes.

Later, we get “All Threes,” a slow-burn groover that features guest vocals from Cat Power and an entrancing rhythm section. Five Dice, All Threes takes a few gambles (e.g., a spoken frame narrative that opens and closes the album in such a way that it presents itself as one giant, Joycean loop—an eternal game of dice), and they mostly pay off.

Oberst’s lyrics are simultaneously direct and opaque, simple and serpentine; the line between fiction and confession is never clear. Although Bright Eyes’ lyrics have long ruminated upon death and loss, Five Dice, All Threes finds the band grappling with middle age, failed relationships, politics, and climate change. The ennui of earlier recordings is still there, but it feels more grounded. Where earlier albums conveyed the angst and depressive fixations of youth, Five Dice, All Threes presents a group coming to terms with living past their raucous, reckless, depressive prime. As Oberst sings on “Real Feel 105°”: “Growing old and confused, beauty’s wasted on youth / There’s too much to redact, there’s too much to include.”