If you’ve never understood or attempted the Yahtzee-adjacent dice game Threes, the first 100 seconds of Five Dice, All Threes should see you more or less right. This opening fanfare, the near-title track “Five Dice”, consists of a clearly experienced Threes player explaining it to some new mark: in the background, radio static punctuates the flicking of channels between opera, rock, old-timey music and old-school radio dramas. The suspicious listener may, by this point, already be forming concerns to the effect that Five Dice, All Threes is some sort of concept album.
Such misgivings are likely to be both reinforced and ameliorated as Five Dice, All Threes proceeds. This preamble is not the last we hear of clattering dice. There are, also, recurrent samples from the 1954 noir flick Suddenly!, in which Frank Sinatra plays a psychotic assassin with designs on the life of the US president. The conceit is not oversold, however: if there is a coherent theme underpinning Five Dice, All Threes, it is a certain anxious bewilderment about how we got here and what we all think we’re doing here now that we have – though as that could be said reasonably accurately about Bright Eyes’ entire catalogue to date, it would be unwise to read overmuch into it.
When we first hear from Bright Eyes properly, on “Bells & Whistles” – a track which contains both of those things – they come out swinging, in both senses of the phrase. The song itself is downright jaunty, and the opening couplet one of those declarations liable to make the listener both curious and apprehensive about where someone might be going with this (“I was cruel, like a president/It was wrong, but I ordered it”). The rest reads like a droll catalogue of regrets from some jaded minor rock god (“…the label asked for a meet and greet/I agreed reluctantly, I couldn’t be alone”) assessing the lessons he has learned the hard way, including the historically sage counsel, “You shouldn’t place bets/On the New York Mets”.
Like a little over half the album, “Bells & Whistles” was co-written with Alex Orange Drink – aka Alex Levine – of The So-So Glos, and like quite a lot of the record, appears laden with nervously grateful nostalgia for the journey so far, and amount of anxiety about what lies ahead. “I never thought I’d see 45,” wonders Coner Oberst on “Bas Jan Ader”, “how is it that I’m still alive?” (Technically, Oberst doesn’t get there until February, so whatever fears do plague him, tempting fate is not among them.) “Bas Jan Ader”, a gentle grunge lullaby, is named for the Dutch performance artist whose final performance was – intentionally or otherwise – disappearing at sea in 1975, putatively attempting a solo crossing of the Atlantic. Like many of the narrators of Five Dice, All Threes, he has arguably set sail with a sub-optimal idea of what he is doing, but then haven’t we all: “It takes a lot of nerve,” notes the first chorus, “to live on planet Earth.”
The album’s other semi-title track, “All Threes”, also serves as its centrepiece. It’s a spectral, minimal ballad, Oberst’s fretting echoed to Nico-like effect by Chan Marshall, and reduces to the barest fundamentals the thesis that we are all, pretty much, rolling dice until they come up something conclusive, one way or the other: “You were so beautiful before/Until you weren’t”.
Absolutely none of which should be read as indication that Five Dice, All Threes is any kind of mawkish manifesto for a mid-life crisis. On quite a lot of the album, Bright Eyes sound like they’ve never had so much fun in their lives. “Rainbow Overpass” is a glorious Old 97s-ish cowpunk romp, “El Capitan” a Joe Ely-like hallucination of incipient apocalypse cresting on a big brass outro, “Trains Still Run On Time” a clattering country singalong which seems to be wondering if the collapse of a republic can really be this ridiculous (“There’s a Disney character breaking down the door/And the orchestra plays a cartoon score for war”).
This is the second album of Bright Eyes’ second act, following 2020’s hiatus-ending Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was. It was always likely that the approach of middle age would suit them: their recent “Companions” series, re-recording selected earlier works, felt like a reconnection with works their creators now understand to have been old, and wise, before their time. Five Dice, All Threes sounds like they’ve caught up with themselves: even if Bright Eyes are struggling to scrape together optimism about the future, there is every reason why their fans should.
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