The last time Conor Oberst performed in D.C. as Bright Eyes, his uneven set ended when he stomped off stage, peeved at the audience’s lack of reverent silence during his quiet songs. There was no such scene at the 930 Club Sunday night, however, where Oberst and his 12-piece “Bright Eyes Orchestra” earned the evening’s air of rapt attention with an engaging two-hour performance.
There were parallels in Bright Eyes big band music to the sensitive sounds of Belle and Sebastian and the sprawling country of Lambchop, but the key spiritual link to Oberst’s art might be Leonard Cohen. Songs like “Laura Laurent”, “Nothing Gets Crossed Out” and “June on the West Coast” dripped with the kind of melodramatic self-obsession Cohen specializes in, and Oberst’s world-weary vocal style on “Kathy With A K’s Song” (replete with a wallflower’s stage presence and hair perpetually falling over one eye) was Leonard renovated for the Zeros. Oberst is a better arranger than Cohen ever was though, and the huge band he assembled ---including french horn, casio, three drummers, strings, winds, chimes, banjo and mandolin--- swelled with deft grace on numbers like “Bowl of Oranges”, “False Advertising” and “Lover I Don’t Have to Love”.
Oberst used Washington to throw a bit of protest singer into his act as well, snarling the anti-media “To Love and Be Loved” and turning “Don’t Know When But A Day is Gonna Come” into a anti-war-with-Iraq screed by adding new lines about “killing the infidels for oil wells” to “save wealthy Texas oil families”. All of which meant Oberst didn’t go away mad, but returned to thundering applause for a generous ---and deserved---encore.
Washington Post, 2002
