Bright Eyes - Noise Floor: Rarities 1998-2005 (Saddle Creek)

What makes or breaks such albums is the balance between the two extremes, combined with how desperate/ nerdy/ obsessive/ gullible its potential consumer might be. Good examples, such as Suede's Sci-Fi Lullabies, can provide an excellent addition to a seminal band's oeuvre. Others, including those you'll find nestling down beside the better-known works of Yo La Tengo or Mercury Rev, can augment a two-disc set and into something more than a collection of singles that anyone likely to buy it probably has already.

At the other end of the scale, such compilations can be a pointless cash-in by a record company faced with a contract-filling gap to plug. This rarities album from the folk-noir genius who once dared to diss John Peel falls, uncomfortably, somewhere in the middle.

As the second disc of a more extensive and complete retrospective, it would work better than it does alone. Part of the problem is that faced with a performer as low-fi and minimal as Conor Oberst in the first place, many of the unfinished demos presented here, such as I Will Be Grateful This Day and Seashell Tale, sound much, much too thin. They are recordings that should never have escaped from the bootleggers.

Opening track Mirrors and Fevers squeals with the white noise feedback of a dictaphone that's accidentally switched itself on in the bottom of an interviewer's bag; Bad Blood sounds as if it's been recorded on a primitive cassette player pushed against the speaker of a radio station that's not quite tuned in.

Shaky demos such as Blue Angels Air Show are not necessarily a waste of iPod space, but at the same time there's a certain conceit involved in assuming anyone else will be interested in them. This is more acceptable in the case of The Beatles or Nirvana than it is in a young singer-songwriter who's still mostly unknown by the mainstream.

Noise Floor does have its genuine gems: the more fully-formed Trees Get Wheeled Away is one, the unbearable fragility of Amy In The White Coat and Soon You Will Be Leaving Your Man are others. As a whole, the delicate-as-cobweb songs and fractured vocals help to define what can make Bright Eyes so good: the suggestion that a tap in the wrong direction might cause him to break at any moment.

As a snapshot of his career since leaving Commander Venus in 1997 to pursue his previous side-project full time, it gives a reasonable overview of what he has to offer, giving fans who were introduced to him with the 2005 double-release Digital Ash in a Digital Urn and I'm Wide Awake Its Morning a chance to hear pre-breakthrough singles including 2003's Drunk Kid Catholic and 2001's I've Been Eating For You.

There's plenty of material you won't get elsewhere unless you're an ebay obsessive or have been following his career in minute detail since day one. If either of the above is the case, you'll have all these tracks already. If you're not and you don't, do you really need them? Of course you do, it's Bright Eyes.

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