Digital Ash In A Digital Urn
- Bright Eyes
- Band Name: Bright Eyes
- Record Label: Saddle Creek
- Release Date: Jan 25, 2005
- Critic Score
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Riskier but not totally out of character; it's the more holistic right brain to Wide Awake's rational left brain. [Feb 2005, p.81]
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A painfully honest, emotionally draining album. [22 Jan 2005, p.49]
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A bold, essential chapter in this young man's inspired body of work.
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88There are a few failed experiments... but these failures are punctuated by astounding moments. [#14, p.95]
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Digital Ash offers enough swelling, androgynous moments to approach its hype, or at least keep up with its release partner.
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80The songs are neither dogmatic nor whacked out. Like fine pop writers before him, Oberst's simply wrestling with something troubling he feels thick in the air. [Feb 2005, p.72]
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80Bright Eyes' foray into the digital domain is among the more interesting experiments of this young year. [Mar 2005, p.109]
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80Not as consistent as its de facto partner, Digital Ash still contains several euphoric highs.
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Mark[s] a remarkable progression from Oberst's teen troubadour origins.
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72Digital Ash has the claustrophobic feel of a singer locked up with a computer, and it's distractingly chipper, like Rilo Kiley in their own Dntel homages; not every Bright Eyes record has to be an emotional epic, but Digital Ash feels like a practice run.
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70The found sounds on Digital Ash can seem an affected and unnecessary embellishment in certain places.... But in other places they work.
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This is not a classic – each high is paired with a low of similar scale, so whilst 'Down In A Rabbit Hole' scales heights previously thought unreachable, 'Ship In A Bottle', with baby samples screeching over the top of the most base-level beats, is plain annoying.
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Despite all the bleeps and blurbs of this album's electronic window dressing, it's still Oberst's emo-tive honesty and lyrical daring that makes up for the album's forgettable moments.
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Oberst's tunes are too lumpy to accommodate the smoothness demanded of synth-pop, and the cumulative effect is often dreary. [4 Feb 2005, p.130]
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Over-produced and (regrettably) heavily dependent on synth-powered '80s grooves.
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60There's an 80s Anglophilic feel throughout, and like the era they're paying homage to it's all very hit and miss.
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60Mostly, these electro trances... sound like an ill-advised quest to make a Williamsburg version of Dark Side Of The Moon. [Mar 2005, p.132]
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The good songs don't start kicking in until about halfway through, after many synth glitches and botched break beats. But once it gets going, it's phenomenal.
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Digital Ash in a Digital Urn is a weepy response to the Postal Service.
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60It tips its hand too early, frontloading its best songs and rendering the second half excessive and ponderous.
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Up against the carefully realized Wide Awake, Digital Ash is a mess, and not just sonically.
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58Most of Digital's songs seem somewhat suffocated. [Feb 2005, p.85]
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Ultimately, it's hard not to feel that this album is little more than a blatant attempt to ape the Postal Service's Give Up.
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40Experimental and confusing... Oberst's voice struggles to hit home through the effects. [Jan 2005, p.129]
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40A stark collection of early 1980's keyboard melodies and anxious guitar solos, Oberst's dark dreams are numb with death and paranoia.
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Urn is a chore.
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Digital garnishment works for Wilco, but not so much for the beat-impaired Oberst.
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20Ghastly. [Feb 2005, p.102]
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 44 out of 53
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Mixed: 3 out of 53
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Negative: 6 out of 53
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TimS9Almost perfect. There are some weak tracks, but so many great ones. My favorite Bright Eyes album to date.
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JamesM7