Three Eyes: (l-r)
ConorOberst, Mike Mogis, Nate Walcott
NIKFREITAS
DEAD OCEANS
8/10
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.