Bright Eyes – Kids Table (Dead Oceans) (13th Floor EP Review)
Bright Eyes’ playful companion to 2024’s Five Dice, All Threes is further evidence of Conor Oberst finding rejuvenation through collaboration. Kids Table, seven songs and a minor soundscape that are mostly leftovers from the last album, is a spirited EP punctuated by some stirring team-ups.
Five Dice was a return to form for the enduring trio of Oberst, Mike Mogis, and Nate Walcott, following 2020’s middling Down In The Weeds Where the World Once Was, and featured Cat Power and The National’s Matt Berninger on two of its most memorable and progressive tracks.
Kids Table is in the same vein, with Hurray For the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra featuring on both the title track and Dyslexic Palindrome, which come from the same sessions as Five Dice, recorded at ARC Studios in their home city of Omaha, Nebraska.
Kids Table, which was almost included on Five Dice as a single, is a rousing opener, an escape into reminiscences and a child’s holiday of big screen movies and family meals, propelled by Walcott’s swirling keys and a comforting chorus. While Oberst ultimately serves irony “on an empty plate”, the imagery is affecting both in the song and as a concept for this collection. Sitting at the kids’ table is all revelry, no responsibility – the way an EP should be.
Over the past 30 years Oberst has gone from indie rock’s wide-eyed boy genius to a weathered campaigner, who during the band’s last tour to NZ in 2023 appeared frayed, almost spent. But there is an exuberance to these songs. Yes, the lyrics are still dark, the outlook bleak, but a wry, hopeful grin can be felt between the lines.
Few could have contemplated a Venn diagram that looped Bright Eyes in with The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, but here we are with the ska-infused 1st World Blues. Co-written with Alex Orange Drink (SoSo Glos), its buoyant tempo may hit like a splash of cold skank to the face of long-time fans, but lyrically this is pure Bright Eyes. The demented travelogue romps across a decaying United States, from New York to Omaha, with gleeful abandon and grim observations on western culture, consumerism and politics. Oberst even has fun at the mall: “Cutting myself in the bathroom at The Gap / With the red snapback Tucker Carlson hat.”
A cover of Lucinda Williams’ Sharp Cutting Wings (Song to a Poet), the most recent recording on Kids Table, is the outlier. The country ballad was apparently the first song Oberst wanted to sing when he was sick and battling vocal problems in 2024. Oberst treats the track as tenderly as Williams, but he sounds weary and vulnerable, his delivery harking back to the raw intimacy of his 2016 solo record Ruminations. When Leslie Stevens accompanies him for the final chorus it’s a sweet relief.
The press material for Kids Table frames Sharp Cutting Wings as the EP’s emotional centrepiece, and sequence-wise it is, but Dyslexic Palindrome is the real gem. A duet between Oberst and Segarra about some poor soul on the run or under the thumb, brightened by Walcott’s delicate piano, the song is slow and gorgeous, and plays like a callback back to The World Is Dangerous – which featured Oberst – on Hurray For The Riff Raff’s stellar The Past Is Still Alive (2024).
The other tracks on Kids Table are curious lesser lights, tonally in step with the songs on Five Dice, All Threes, but inferior. Oberst and Bright Eyes could make a killer compilation from their odds, ends and EPs over the years, and it’s saying something that four tracks here would be worthy. Given the current trend of stuffing extra tunes into “deluxe” digital editions, it’s to be celebrated that there’s a Kids Table at all. These songs deserve their own space and identity.
Matthew Dallas
Kids Table is out now on Dead Oceans
