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Mar 21, 2011The band has pulled off the difficult trick of sculpting a record concerned with weighty, complex themes and made it sound like the breeziest, most effortless thing in the world: a collection of fleet, shimmering pop songs; a master-class in sonic splendour; a bold, beautiful and brilliant reinvention that should surprise as many as it will enthrall.
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Feb 28, 2011It's good to listen to a record like The People's Key, if for no other reason, just to appreciate a songwriter who knew exactly what he wanted to do and executed it perfectly.
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Feb 15, 2011He delivers a truer, less emotional, album-length confession about wanting to believe the unbelievable, and loving others for wanting the same.
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Mar 23, 2011He knows his job is to play us music, but he's got to do it for him, too.
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Mar 23, 2011For all their diversity and maturity, these songs couldn't have been written by anyone else, and this welcome return shows that the three years since the last Bright Eyes album have been well spent.
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Mar 22, 2011With The People's Key, he continues to solidify his place as one of the great songwriters of his generation. Here's hoping he doesn't hang it up anytime soon.
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Q MagazineMar 9, 2011If this really is a farewell, Bright Eyes is at least going out with an apocalyptic bang. [March 2011, p. 100]
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Feb 17, 2011Perhaps Oberst finds it tough to bring his brilliant bile to bear upon a synth the way he attacks an acoustic; a shame, as The People's Key is otherwise synthetic perfection.
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Feb 16, 2011Depending on how one looks at it, The People's Key might even be understood as the culmination of a long and troublesome trajectory Bright Eyes began as a teenager's bedroom project in the mid-90s.
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Feb 16, 2011As much as this album sounds like a final chapter, a loose-end knotting affair designed as a summary statement, there are no subplots left unresolved.
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Feb 15, 2011Conor Oberst has always been an artist to inspire, irritate and frustrate, and on what he says will be the final BE album he does these things in equal measure.
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Feb 10, 2011It's as if Bright Eyes have finally exited their bedroom and entered a brave new musical world
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Feb 18, 2011The People's Key is a return to immediacy after the arguably overlong concept album Cassadaga.
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Feb 14, 2011Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst takes a walk with the mystics on the band's latest album.
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Feb 24, 2011The People's Key, more or less Oberst's 10th album as Bright Eyes, finds him aiming for the prophetic over the personal, embracing the luxuries of the studio instead of hunkering down in the bedroom.
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Alternative PressFeb 23, 2011The anger is what makes The People's Key's best moments so vital. [Mar 2011, p.98]
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Feb 23, 2011While some of the tracks don't exactly have the staying power of the record's haunting opener, this is a solid collection of songs from an artist who has been making these things since his childhood.
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Feb 18, 2011The People's Key just doesn't have the emotional pull that others do.
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Feb 18, 2011The best thing to do on The People's Key isn't to connect with Oberst's lyrics. It's to connect with how connected Oberst is with what he's singing.
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Feb 16, 2011Perhaps it lacks ballast and gestalt, but Bright Eyes arguably operates better on a smaller scale, trading pretension for fractured pop that cuts into the cranium with skewed precision.
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Feb 14, 2011The People's Key proves Oberst has learned to balance a cutting perspective with a bleeding heart.
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Feb 14, 2011He manages to be everything at once: folkie and punk, old soul and eternal boy, high-plains drifter and hipster heartthrob.
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Feb 14, 2011Mescaline-soaked narratives woven through hallucinatory images of Americana.
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Feb 14, 2011The People's Key is not a bad album. In fact, boil the meat off these tracks, and you'd probably have the skeleton of a quite good album.
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Feb 15, 2011Key may still sound angry, but Oberst's wrong on one point - he's always found true reasons to be before.
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MojoApr 6, 2011Conor Oberst regroups with the band that made him. [March 2011, p. 94]
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Feb 25, 2011There's not a lot fundamentally wrong with The People's Key; it's just that we know Bright Eyes can do better.
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Feb 16, 2011It's funny: after all that growth, Conor Oberst chooses to end his Bright Eyes project right back where it all began-with an unapologetic declaration of solipsism.
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Feb 16, 2011The arrangements are pleasurable enough, less rootsy than before, with some skilled use of orchestration; but it's a shame to find such a gifted songwriter sounding so gullible.
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UncutFeb 15, 2011Problematically for a singer-songwriter, Oberst drops personal feelings, wry asides and hip references equally lightly--ultimately, you're disinclined to believe anything he says at all. [Mar 2011, p.85]
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Feb 23, 2011The musicianship is outstanding, as one would expect, and Mike Mogis' production is, as usual, flawless, but the songs and direction simply aren't there.
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Feb 16, 2011Every line is laid with the rich sense of rhythm and texture that he's mastered over the years, but it still adds up to very little: a wildly spiritual record without any spirit.
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Feb 16, 2011This overflowing sense of self has done more to define Oberst than anything else, and it continues on The People's Key, spilling into the contemporary malaise he invokes and the often brilliant poetic associations of which he's sometimes capable.
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Feb 15, 2011Ultimately it amounts to two decent tunes in the singer-songwriter pop idiom, padded out with angsty filler and hot air.
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Mar 17, 2011Oberst's voice trembles with the emotion of his youth, only ripped with spite instead of vulnerability. That solipsism has shifted to an even more detached universalism, which leaves little for the listener to connect with.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 35 out of 41
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Mixed: 6 out of 41
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Negative: 0 out of 41
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Feb 15, 2011
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Jan 2, 2012
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Aug 30, 2011