Somewhere Inside Everybody, There's Either a Greasy-Haired, Bespectacled Emo Nerd or a Hot Topic Mall Goth

There's little that is more frustrating than when you find yourself liking an album by an artist you hate. I mean, really hate. I mean, like you hate him so much that when you hear his harrowingly strung-out warble, you want to take a pair of scissors and snip through your skull straight through to the auditory cortex. Or better, take a pair of scissors and cut right through those moneymaking, teenage-sigh-inducing vocal cords, and those twanging guitar strings.

Of course, I'm talking about goddamn Bright Eyes. Fucking Conor Oberst, that waifish, tousle-haired, sloe-eyed, pretty little elf of a singer-songwriter; a Costco of everything that is deplorable about hipsters: wholesale indulgence, pretentiousness and self-pity. I've listened to a lot of his stuff: the miserable, gloomy, stressful angst of Fevers and Mirrors, his jumpy squalls on his pompously-named Lifted, or the Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground. I even listened to his intimate, confessional petulance in his split EP with Son, Ambulance.

And I've secretly loved it. I hate, hate, hate Bright Eyes, possibly because his music makes me realize that somewhere deep inside me, there is a peevish adolescent--an excruciatingly banal model of disaffected American youth, who believes that she identifies with every single lugubrious word that issues from his lips.

And he's cute, too.

What makes it worse is that his new album I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning (how repulsive is that name?) is actually a genuinely good album. Not because it's a sullen lament. Au contraire, it is an alluring alt. country oeuvre, complete with blues, travelling on the open road, sweetly idyllic childhood memories and cameos by Emmylous Harris. For once, I can get past his abrasive, harsh voice and actually enjoy his songs without feeling guilty, because they're artless, sweet and unpretentious. While he still uses some annoying language--"I'm a single cell/On a serpant's tongue/There's a muddy field/Where a garden was," most of his lyrics are still easier to swallow than those of prior albums: "Does he cry through broken sentences, like 'I love you far too much'?" I recommend "Land Locked Blues" and "Poison Oak."

While it's frustrating to like music created by somebody you hate on principle, I feel like I'm justified in actually liking I'm Wide Awake, It' Morning.

Oh, who am I kidding? Bright Eyes sucks.

Listening to: "Poison Oak" by Bright Eyes (NO!)