There’s a 0.01286% chance — about 1 in 7776 — that you’ll roll the combination referenced in the title of indie band Bright Eyes’ 11th LP: Five Dice, All Threes.
It’s a perfect yet improbable roll in the game of Threes, an apt framing device for an album about living on in the face of overwhelming bleakness while salvaging whatever optimism remains along the way. As close collaborator Alex Orange Drink (lead singer of punk band The So So Glos) puts it in a YouTube interview, “It’s like going through this against-all-odds dark thing, and you’re gonna roll a perfect roll and just be alright.”
As someone more familiar with their 2000s work — including critically acclaimed, seminal albums like 2005’s I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning — I’ve always found lead singer Conor Oberst’s style to be uncompromisingly depressing yet thoughtful and lucid. His lyrics have a way of burrowing deep under your skin, offering agonizingly bleak autobiographical reflections over indie-folk instrumentation from bandmates Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott.
Oberst excels at distilling emotional complexity into arresting imagery. Take my favorite Bright Eyes song, “Poison Oak”, where he undergoes catharsis as he sings, “But me, I’m a single cell, on a serpent’s tongue / There’s a muddy field where a garden was.”
Nearly two decades later, Five Dice, All Threes still features Oberst’s unmistakable voice, full of fractured intensity. It continues to deliver poetic lyrics, often politically sharp and steeped in misery. At the age of 44, however, he trades some of the abstraction of his younger years for blunter reflections on life’s harsh realities and morbid observations. Mortality, in particular, is a more urgent theme here along with other timely topics such as the slow rotting of social media, escapism from self-hatred, numbing American capitalism, the bleak future of humanity in AI age and Oberst’s growing disillusionment with organized religion.
You could say that, lyrically, this is Bright Eyes’ saddest and bleakest album yet, especially when Oberst's struggles on Five Dice, All Threes are painfully visible in real life. In recent live performances, attendees have reported that he has voiced threatening thoughts or appeared to be intoxicated, and the band ultimately cancelled shows in 2024.
Yet, despite its maudlin subject matter, Five Dice, All Threes has a surprisingly boisterous, buoyant and sometimes triumphant sound that incorporates pop, jazz and punk influences. In an interview with New Musical Express, Oberst describes it as a lighter album in tone, stating, “The word ‘fun’ is very rarely used to describe my band, but maybe it is a bit more fun.”
This contrast between grim content and a lighter sound is most evident when Oberst writes about his self-destructive behavior in the opening track “Bells and Whistles” and “Tiny Suicides.”
“Bells and Whistles” is an ostensibly “fun” song, but it’s a self-critical kind of fun. The lively, upbeat and almost frivolous indie-rock instrumentation contrasts with Oberst’s reflections on “expensive jokes and cheap thrills” that slowly chip away at his life. The lifestyle he lives as a famous musician is reduced to cheap, hollow images: SoHo girls more interested in materialism than meaning and avoiding bets on the Mets because, as he explains in the next lines, the future is “hypothetical.” The slow erosion of both body and mind during label-mandated fan meets is captured in honest imagery like, “I was shaking hands with the manicured / Worked my fingers to the bone.” A brief but fatalistic reference to Princess Diana’s car accident implies that Oberst foresees his own self-destructive path ending in a similarly dramatic and explosive fashion.
By contrast, “Tiny Suicides” is much darker both lyrically and sonically. The stripped-back instrumentation allows Oberst’s snarling vocals to take center stage, delivering some of the album’s most brutal lines, like “Am I gonna die? / Or beat back all these tiny suicides?” and “Maybe if the sky aligns / Maybe I could have you one last time.” Unlike in “Bells and Whistles,” where there’s a sense of detachment, Oberst is fully self-aware here, confronting the guilt he feels for indulging in these “tiny suicides”. This self-destruction is further framed within the fear of religious damnation, as he sings, “Tried to tip my way into Heaven’s gate / Must have lost a fortune along the way.” This is an interesting sentiment given his growing disillusionment with faith that is explored in other tracks like “Bas Jan Ader.”
Fans familiar with the Bright Eyes lore would probably figure out that the song “Real Feel 105°” is likely about Oberst’s speculated ex-partner, renowned singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers, as the lyrics allude to Bridgers’s “Moon Song” and their public songwriting partnership. It weaves in poetic imagery of the songwriting process that they shared, with lines like “And then you came along, wanted help with a song / Want a peek through the curtains to see how it’s done / We’re all make believe gods like the Wizard of Oz / ‘Name the animals, let there be light.’” The song builds to a devastating climax, underscored by a poignant piano progression that moves from blunt confessions like “Where you saw a rope swing, I saw a noose” to the realization that nothing will change, even if they get back together.
“All Threes,” featuring Cat Power, is an undeniable standout in Bright Eyes’ whole discography and perhaps the most compositionally intriguing track on the album. It’s long and amorphous, blending melancholic jazz influences with elastic piano riffs, droning organs and a simple digital drum beat. The lyrics are cryptic and vitriolic, delivering some of the album’s sharpest critiques. As pointed out by some critics, lines like “Jesus died in a cage fight” and “Elon Musk / in virgin whites / I kill him in an alley over five dice” likely critique how spiritual figures like Jesus have been corrupted and replaced by hyper-capitalist figures like Elon Musk, who are wrongly positioned as the new saviors of humanity.
The rousing “Rainbow Overpass,” featuring Alex Orange Drink, injects a much-needed burst of irreverent energy. It channels a boisterous punk rock ethos with light distorted guitars, heavy trumpet sections and a catchy synth line. Lyrically, it’s an immediate and straightforward confession about wanting to escape somewhere far from life — but not to die. Oberst doesn’t shy away from the self-deprecating thoughts that drive him into this escapism, delivering lines like “Lately I can’t sleep, just lay awake feeding on my feed” and the dissociative “When that thing just doesn’t sing, it’s just some thing I drag around,” a biting description about his own voice.
Throughout the album, Oberst occasionally nods to the state of the world, particularly in relation to religion and technology, though the only tracks that are dedicated to a full societal critique are “Trains Still Run on Time” and, to some extent, “Hate.”
The title “Trains Still Run on Time” references a phrase used by fascist sympathizers to justify Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship, much like how modern supporters of corporate America downplay its dehumanizing aspects in order to praise of its efficiency. It’s this type of world that creates men “made in America on a factory floor” who are dressed in conformity like “another unicorn in a uniform” and beg for rebirth. The refrain “No separation / No Berlin Wall / No celebration / No confusion / When it falls” suggests that, unlike the great cultural revolutions of history, the collapse of modern America will be met with numbness; that is, if we even get a chance to make collective change.
On the surface, the song “Hate,” which is easily the most controversial on the album, is about Oberst’s hatred of organized religion in the modern world. Oberst spirals into a bitter, hyper-negative rant, listing various things he hates and taking aim at puritans, prophets, Abraham, Adam, Isaiah and Mohammed. Though his bitter writing style can sometimes be compelling, this listing feels too much like a trite, Reddit-style anthem. Fortunately, the song becomes more interesting in the second half when he directs his criticism inwards, most notably with “I hate the protest singer, staring at me in the mirror.” The final line, “The artificial poets from the future are here,” warns about the use of generative AI in art. Thus the utterly unrefined and unpoetic nature of the lyrics are emphasized as something that only a human could create.
The album concludes with a pair of companion pieces, “The Time I Have Left” and “Tin Soldier Boy,” both explicitly addressing Oberst’s mortality. “Tin Soldier Boy” builds to a triumphant trumpet climax, followed by the sound of dice being rolled and one landing on a “three,“ bringing the album’s theme full circle: Despite the overwhelming bleakness of life, there’s always the faint hope of rolling a perfect outcome.
Five Dice, All Threes is a deeply personal and politically-charged album, balancing Oberst’s self-destructive tendencies with moments of lightness and irreverence. Ultimately, the album asks us to consider: In the face of crushing American capitalism, the bitterness of lost romances, numbing social media rot, the collapse of organized religion and existential dread — do we succumb to tiny suicides or do we roll the dice and hope for something better?
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