Album Details

• Artist: Bright Eyes
• Album: Fevers And Mirrors
• Label: Saddle Creek
• Year of Release: 2000
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: deatheyesforkiley on 2008-03-04

Before Bright Eyes released I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, before Cassadaga, before Digital Ash In a Digital Urn came a little album titled Fevers and Mirrors. This album is simply superb. Some of Connor's best writing is on this album. This album is much more raw and somehow much more powerful than its predecessors. It contains a callowness that you will not hear on anything post Fevers and Mirrors.

Fevers and Mirrors opens with a song titled "A Spindle, A Darkness, A Fever, and A Necklace." The song begins with a young boy speaking that catches your attention and gets you interested. After the boy finishes speaking the beauty and awe begins. The first track is nowhere near the best of the album, yet it sets the tone for the rest of the set. Throughout the course of listening to the album will you begin to think you have heard the peak of the album and time and time again be wrong. The first time I listened to the third track dubbed "The Calendar Hung Itself" I was simply speechless. This was one of the best songs I had ever heard. When Connors shaking voice rung out "You are my sunshine, my only sunshine" It took me back to my childhood and brought an emotion of helplessness that you only have as a child. This album will play games with your emotions. The combination of Connor's voice and the beautiful music they set his poetry to makes you feel things no other band can. After "The Calendar Hung Itself" the album moves along at a beautiful pace. Then you get to a little ditty that we know as "Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh." This may very well be the best song I have ever heard. It tells a story of betrayal and its tone along with the vocals let you know from the get go you are not in for a happy ending. With depressed lyrics such as "You said you hate my suffering and you understood and you'd take care of me, you'd always be there......well where are you now?" this songs screams perfection in your ear and will make leave you stuck on track 8 of the album until you know every word. The last three songs of Fevers and Mirrors carry the perfection set by "Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh" extremely well. Though they all are amazing the best of the final three is, "Sunrise, Sunset." The music starts slowly as most songs of the album do before it picks up and wraps you into a frenzy of beautiful lyrics and amazing musicianship.

This effort is truly an example of Bright Eyes at their emotional and professional best. This is the album that started it all. It brought the popularity, the success, and the amazing reviews. When you put this album in you had better be prepared to go on a rollercoaster of feelings and emotions that will leave you different than before. Fevers and Mirrors is amazing and may well be the best of the Bright Eyes.

User Reviews and Comments

Review:

on 2007-07-09 SolitaryMan Said:

If you asked around, in 2000, I'm sure you'd find quite a few fans of Bright Eyes. They'd released two albums and, for all intents and purposes, poised themselves ready to strike. "Fevers And Mirrors" represents their best work to date (that date being 2000, mind you) and the biggest leap in maturity witnessed in Bright Eyes' discography. What makes this album special isn't so much due to a change in style or direction as it is in production value and songwriting; both have improved to the point were what Connor is trying to express, emotionally, comes through crystal-clear. "The Calendar Hung Itself" and "Haligh, Haligh, A Lie, Haligh" were the songs that drew me to the band originally and, to me, represent the band at their most clever and heartfelt. The album has some stinkers (no Bright Eyes album has been free of them), but for it's moment in Bright Eyes' chronology and it's steady and level sense of melancholic agony, "Fevers And Mirrors" will always stand as a sort of breaking-out, and also as a quality album not to be missed.
Rating: 7/10