Kids Table EP

Conor Oberst channels wary optimism through the magnified emotions of childhood. Across the Bright Eyes discography, he’s losing his grip at ice cream socials and carnivals and starting life anew again at the first glance of his lover—attempts to recapture youth, laden with the dramatic irony that the grim reaper waits for no one.

Oberst has described this inexorable march towards death many times before: as a ferris wheel that must eventually come down, or a transition between songs on the radio. On the new Bright Eyes EP Kids Table, existence is a board game; sketched out on its cover is a literal game of life with sections like “Try a new SSRI” and “Vasectomy, Tubal Ligation, Etc.” There are plenty of wayward turns along the way—bridges to Factory Jobs and Night Terrors—but no avoiding the eternal sleep at the end of its winding path.

But Kids Table falls short of the transcendent subjectivity Oberst has so painstakingly captured in the past, the brutal honesty and uncertainty that made his blood-soaked verses and bleating voice resonate with generations of downtrodden seekers. Instead, Oberst relies here on overburdened metaphors and obvious rhymes, burying the few needles of wisdom in a haystack of heavy-handed platitudes.

The songs on this EP were largely culled from the same sessions as Bright Eyes’ 2024 record Five Dice, All Threes. These misfit recordings suffer from the same problems that plagued that album—namely, many sound lifeless, deflated, as if Oberst can barely pick his head up to sing into the mic—exacerbated by the EP’s abridged format. Of course, despondency has long been a calling card for Bright Eyes, but here, it’s highlighted by prosaic lyrics and sparse instrumentation, a waste of the talents of bandmates Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott.

On “Cairns (When Your Heart Belongs to Everyone),” he sulks about the pressures of being a public figure with a series of increasingly strained comparisons: “a flower shop in June,” “footprints on the moon,” “a corner store that’s out of booze.” “Shakespeare in a Nutshell” is perhaps the worst offender, a muted electric piano backing Oberst as he mopes, “I have no one to depend on, Gentile or Jew.” It’s not just that his couplets beget eye rolls, but that they feel like retrodden territory without any new insights, moving backwards on his board game of life without any nuance or self-reflection to show for it.

This lethargy becomes pointedly obvious on their cover of Lucinda Williams’ “Sharp Cutting Wings (Song to a Poet).” On his warbling lips and somberly plucked guitar, the song loses the ambiguity in Williams’ rendition, the way her voice could express polarized emotions—doubt and hope, affection and suspicion—within a single word. Only when folk vocalist Leslie Stevens joins him does the song begin to recapture the resigned warmth of the original. 

Similarly, the album’s strengths often come from incorporating the voice of another: On two songs across the EP, Oberst recruits tourmate Alynda Segarra (of Hurray for the Riff Raff), who provides some much-needed muscle to contrast his half-hearted melodies. As they sing “Blasting off to outer space/Small step in a big rat race” on the title track’s final refrain, Oberst’s gravely low-end finds a harmony with Segarra’s fiery vocals, and the album finds its footing. On “Dyslexic Palindrome,” Segarra takes the lead, their disquieting vibrato building the necessary tension that Oberst’s meek “Wow!” fails to reach.

When they break free from the tired motions of routine melancholy, Bright Eyes manage to rekindle their strange groove. The album’s unexpectedly ska single, “1st World Blues,” shakes off the languorous pace of the album’s opening songs with an uptempo beat, a horn section, and a disaffected, no-bullshit speak-talk cadence from Oberst. It strangely works; like his work in Desaparacidos, his most memorable lyrics as of late directly tackle the material, political realities that inform his and his fans’ bleak outlooks. “You’re just a tool that’s never gonna get used,” he sneers, emboldened and aggressive in the face of capitalist alienation.

Oberst is no stranger to arrested development. On 2007’s Four Winds EP, he sang about “[asking] like a child may I be excused,” a prophetic hint of the perpetual kids table at which he now sits. But the longer he remains mentally rooted in adolescence, the harder it becomes to wring new insights from its potent feelings. On the new Bright Eyes EP, Oberst sings about “sitting at the kids table with an empty plate.” It’s an apt metaphor for a record that feels held back by the pull of youth, so tightly shackled to nostalgia that it leaves its singer, and its audience, hungry for more.