Album: Bright Eyes

Lifted, or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, Wichita

Conor Oberst, creative mainspring of the Nebraskan alt.country outfit Bright Eyes, is almost as prolific as Ryan Adams, with no fewer than five Bright Eyes albums and one by his noisier punk-rock band Desaparecidos released so far in his eight-year career.

He's still only 22, which means that earlier LPs may not have featured the most mature of reflections – something that the concept album Lifted redresses with a vengeance in Oberst's feverish ruminations on love, ambition, creativity and redemption. Like Adams and Will Oldham – and Dylan, Waits and Cohen before them – he seems a young man old before his time, stung to world-weary cynicism about both romance ("Love is an excuse to get hurt and to hurt") and the uneasy compromise between commerce and culture, but capable of Zen insights of some depth, too. "There is nothing I know except that this lifetime is one moment and wishing will just leave me empty," runs a line from the opening track, "The Big Picture", which just about sums things up.

The album starts with a car journey, into which intrude desultory organ and guitar, before passengers are "sucked in" – to use Oberst's term – to the tape deck for the duration of the ride/album, in a manner analogous to the book in the film The Never-Ending Story. Rather than fantastic stories, however, Lifted offers a tour of Oberst's emotional state, couched in arrangements that colour his lo-fi guitar and racked vocals with keyboards, vibes, banjo, hammer dulcimer, pedal steel guitar, mandolin, strings and horns, with fake vinyl crackle applied to differentiate between the truth of art and the artifice of "real" life, one of the album's abiding themes. "If I could just speak up, I think I would say that there is no truth/ There is only you and what you make the truth," he outlines in typically hesitant fashion in "Don't Know When but a Day Is Gonna Come"; while later on, in "Waste of Paint", he assesses the impact of voracious reading on his character by claiming, "I am never real; it is just a sketch of me."

Against such self-abnegation, Oberst celebrates the purity of spirit in one's first love, the power of creativity, and the infinite patience required for transcendence, culminating in the redemption of "Let's Not Shit Ourselves", a jolly country-rock number flushed with the relief of failed suicide, and protective of personal pain. "Ambition, I've found, can lead only to failure," he sings. "I do not read the reviews. No, I am not singing for you." The implication being: to come to terms with the self, ultimately we all must sing for ourselves.