CD reviews: Bright Eyes, PJ Harvey

Bright Eyes, "The People's Key" (Saddle Creek)

"I take some comfort in knowing the wave has crested," Conor Oberst sings in "Haile Selassie," a Rasta-flavored "One Love"-style exaltation, a typically finely crafted soul-folk rumination. "Knowing I don't have to be an exception."

Oberst, who makes up Bright Eyes along with instrumentalists Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott, turned 31 last week, and he has been marked as a songwriting wunderkind since he was a teenager. "The People's Key" is the first Bright Eyes album since 1997 (although in the interim Oberst has released two albums under his own name, plus one with Monsters of Folk). For the most part, Oberst sounds relieved of generation-spokesman pressure, and happy to get down to the business of writing excellent songs. And there are a bunch on the musically varied "People's Key," from the refreshing, rocked-out and riffy "Shell Game" to the spiritual-sustenance-seeking, piano-tinkling philosophizer "Ladder Song." This CD is tarnished by the spoken ramblings of mystically minded cowboy and Oberst pal Randy Brewer, which pop up on three occasions to waste everybody's time.

Bright Eyes performs April 4-5 at First Avenue in Minneapolis.

DAN DELUCA, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

PJ Harvey, "Let England Shake" (Vagrant)

Love-hate relationships have always ignited the lyrics of Harvey's songs. Through much of her remarkable career, she has sung about personal, intimate strife. On her eighth studio album, the songs are about patriotism, even for an England in long decline, and the harsh price that love of country can exact: blood shed in wars past and present. Often Harvey casts herself as a soldier or an observer, a wraith hovering above battlefields.

Yet the songs are far more pensive than strident. The music suggests something bombed out and only partly rebuilt. Harvey's vocals rise out of a kind of bleary skiffle. The melodies hint at hymns and traditional songs, sometimes turned halting and irregular. Harvey sings most of them in her quavery upper register, trying to convey desperate news.

Now and then a sample drifts in from afar. In "England" Harvey's voice tangles with the leaping, breaking vocals of Said El Kurdy, recorded in Baghdad in the 1920s. "Written on the Forehead," which mentions the currency of various Middle Eastern and North African countries, is interwoven with the Jamaican reggae of Niney the Observer's "Blood & Fire." Perhaps they are souvenirs of empire, or warnings that empires fall.

"Let England Shake" stays haunted by the casualties.