Fevers and Mirrors

Editors' Notes Conor Oberst’s second album as Bright Eyes cemented the image of indie-folk as a bastion of intense oversharing, braiding the intimacy of singer/songwriters with the urgency of punk. From the searing (“The Calendar Hung Itself”) to the serene (“Something Vague”), the overarching feeling here is one of incredible stakes, a place where nothing means anything and everything means something. But for as raw as his presence was, Oberst’s imagery often felt dreamy, a Victorian world of spindles and lockets that hummed behind his stark Midwestern scenes like ghosts—a kind of Nebraskan companion to Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.