Conor Oberst is being hailed in the US as the voice of a generation, but when you listen to his records, it is quite hard to see why. Whether he is singing with Bright Eyes or his rock group, Desaparecidos, his voice is unique, troubling and sometimes irritating. He quivers over every syllable as though someone were tickling his Adam's apple with a rusty nail, suddenly rising to a pained squawk that could bore holes into brick. Add that to the chaotic music and bedroom production values of his records, and Oberst makes decidedly uneasy listening.
Those albums - 10 of them now - are no preparation for his live show with Bright Eyes. There are 11 people on stage, a jumper-clad folk orchestra with cello, flute, banjo and accordion, the last played by a man with a joke-shop handlebar moustache.
ULU's appalling, treble-heavy sound system favours Oberst's guitar and keyboards and regularly renders the other instruments inaudible. You expect a complete mess. But what you hear is an elegant, even delicate music, ranging with unexpected confidence from slow, swooning waltzes to bubblegum country pop, via murky seductions and lurching rock. It is revelatory.
And then comes an even bigger surprise: Oberst's voice. Keeping all stylistic tics in check, he creates the vocal equivalent of a furious caress. He doesn't write songs so much as prolix prose poems, a barrage of words so relentless that it would be exhausting to catch every word. Instead you are caught by a luminous image, struck by phrases piercing as arrows. "My sheets and tubes were all tangled, weak from whiskey and pills, in a Chicago hospital," he narrates in Let's Not Shit Ourselves, a wrenching song about a failed suicide attempt. Oberst is only 22, but his lyrics betray harsh experience and a frightening maturity. "Well you say that I treat you like a book on the shelf," starts the peculiarly titled You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will. You hear him capture the weariness of lives desiccated over decades, and wonder how he can possibly know.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that someone who writes so excoriatingly of depression, who can express self-hate with such acidic anger, should prove such an affable, beguiling frontman. He doesn't hide behind his haywire hair but pushes it back from his face; he flirts and chats with the audience ("Am I happy? I'm chafed - I mean chuffed"). And he explains his songs with sweet self-effacement: "This is a song about my favourite imaginary girlfriend." The more agonised his lyrics, the more mesmerising he is to watch. And when you watch him, those voice-of-a-generation comments don't seem like hyperbole after all.
