E-Mail This Article to a Friend Taking his leave (continued)

Although stylistically dissimilar, these albums bear the same thematic conflicts that overwhelm any Catholic-school boy with a racing mind, heavy-hearted despair, and a taste for alcohol: God, religion, love, life, death, time, politics, war, drinking. Wide Awake opens with a sip and a swallow, as Oberst slugs back whiskey before narrating a tale of two strangers on a nose-diving airliner whose deathbound dialogue turns into a cathartic, mandolin-accompanied barn dance, "At the Bottom of Everything." Then as the plane plunges into the Pacific, Oberst cries happily, "Then they splashed into the deep blue sea! And it was a wonderful splash." If death is redemption, he postulates, there’s no reason to cry. "We Are Nowhere and It’s Now" is a gorgeous, floating arrangement of mandolin, trumpet, and piano; the voices of Harris and Oberst fit together so well, you can imagine them spooning. Oberst can spin a phrase like a roulette wheel, never quite knowing where he’ll end up, and he does so on the gentle, wistful, guitar-strumming "Poison Oak." His voice trembles over Mogis’s pedal steel: "Let the poets cry themselves to sleep/And all their tearful words will turn back into steam/Me, I’m a single cell on a serpent’s tongue." On "Another Travelin’ Song," he fancies himself a writer: "Now I’m hunched over a typewriter/I guess you call that painting in a cave."

Oberst’s first utterance on Digital Ash is the word "death." Years ago, he experimented with digital sounds on the disjointed Letting Off the Happiness (LBJ). Back then, the gargling-robot burbles and Atari death knells were distractions from his ragged warble. But six years later, he manages to get the machines working for him, conscripting Tamborello and the Faint’s Clark Baechle to handle programming. Digital Ash’s opening track, "Time Code," is an aural dreamscape, an organ dirge that regurgitates the subconscious’s intake, expelling church bells, children’s conversations, and distant screams, only to be interrupted by an alarm clock. On the Tamborello-fingerprinted "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)," theremin specters and clinking coins score Oberst’s tale of abandonment by an older woman. "Gold Mine Gutted" is the sonic equivalent of that foggy-headed, pre-pain hangover state where everything’s in slow motion and every gesture portends a weighty import as he reflects on being a big fish in a small puddle: "Living the Good Life I left for dead/the sorrowful Midwest/I did my best/To keep my head."

For now at least, Oberst keeps coming back to Omaha. Back when he was the lead screamer in a noisy indie-rock side project called Desaparecidos, he unleashed an acrimonious rant against his birthplace’s urban sprawl and girthy midsections on Read Music/Speak Spanish’s "Greater Omaha": "I have been driving now for 100 blocks/Saw 50 Kum & Go’s/60 parking lots/One more mouthful and I’m sure/They will be happy then." In Wide Awake’s "Landlocked Blues," he works through his motivations for moving 1400 miles: "So I’m making a deal with the devils of fame/Saying let me walk away please." Like fellow Omaha defectors cartoonist Chris Ware and filmmaker Alexander Payne, Oberst keeps being drawn to portray, even mock, the quotidian aspects of a cultureless, humdrum town: dead-end office jobs, blind consumerism, people who live for vacation days. But he’s worked through the purgatorial identity crisis of being from somewhere, "It seems, we’ve been in between a past and present town/We are nowhere, and it’s now." In the end, the two new albums scribble a sonic journal of a contemplative twentysomething who’s fled home to establish a new life elsewhere but is realizing that his roots, no matter how rotten or ugly, ground him.

Beneath it all, Oberst always seems doomed to sabotage himself, whether it’s those self-fulfilling prophecies of leaving lovers or his need to inject cacophony into the middle of a beautifully sculpted song. Digital Ash’s "Ship in a Bottle" is a meditation on aging that begins with an electronic oceanic-seashell echo, then segues into Oberst’s best lyrical declaration of longing since "The Calendar Hung Itself" on Fevers and Mirrors: "I want to be the surgeon that cuts you open/That fixes all of life’s mistakes/I want to be the house that you were raised in/The only place that you feel safe/I want to be the shower in the morning that wakes you up and makes you clean/I know I’m just the weather against your window, as you sleep through a winter’s dream." Then about a third of the way in, as he admits to fearing that knowledge turns people old, he brings the kaleidoscopic organ and toe-tapping beat to a grinding halt with an infant’s runny-nosed wails, mocking horns, and muffled cries. Challenging the listener is one thing; turning the perfect puppy-love mix-tape song into a crappy sampling experiment is another.

But Oberst loves dissonance. For Wide Awake’s finale, he lifts the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, deferentially calling his adaptation "Road to Joy" and setting the melody against a droning organ. Despite the mention of humming cemeteries, meaningless war, and rising body counts, he turns the hymn into an emboldened, kicking-sand-in-their-faces anthem for a anyone disillusioned by the current state of the nation. At the last minute, he flips the song back onto himself, admitting in his brink-of-madness tremble that there’s something about a breakdown, a sad song, a collapse that he can’t resist. "I could have be a famous singer/If I had someone else’s voice/But failure’s always sounded better/Let’s fuck it up boys, make some noise!"

Bright Eyes play this Monday, January 24, at Sanders Theatre, 45 Quincy Street in Harvard Square, with CocoRosie and Tilly and the Wall. The show is officially sold out.