No album we review here is exempt from getting a numerical score, so just believe me when I say I did the best I could up there. Because isn't Fevers and Mirrors ultimately critic-proof? After all, while reviewing it 12 years ago for Pitchfork, Taylor M. Clark questioned whether Conor Oberst's mortal frame could withstand his all-consuming ambition, called the vocals "hypothermic," and debated whether the record was more narcissistic or solipsistic. I actually agree with him-- I just also happen to think those are some of Fevers and Mirrors' most uniquely compelling qualities. And how can you account for the emotional attachment listeners have to this thing? The symbolic significance of Fevers and Mirrors' title boils down to how, in self-reflection, we reveal only the ailments which we project. And if this is somehow your first experience with Bright Eyes, I'd suggest you take a gander at songmeanings.net, where the dozen songs here are among the most commented-upon in the site's archives. This thing causes our internal mirrors to reflect some fucked-up fevers.

As such, there's the temptation to use this, the culmination of Saddle Creek's reissue of Oberst's earliest Bright Eyes material, as a review of memories rather than music. The worry is that this will somehow be ineffective without my giving you a couple of Facebook pages of girls I knew in college and my scratched CD which skipped about two minutes into "A Song to Pass the Time". But, nah. Fevers and Mirrors isn't degraded from being removed from the bullshit of your youth, and in any context it's a tremendous record that is "critic-proof" in the same way Violent Femmes, Pinkerton, and, yes, the Smiths are. Scoff if you must, but let me ask you this: How many people do you know got into Morrissey as teens? Okay, now how many got started in their 30s?

That said, Oberst and I are the same age and neither of us has outgrown Fevers and Mirrors: On his end, you'll never hear a live performance of "The Calendar Hung Itself…" as something done out of obligation. And in light of recent releases as divergent as Death Grips' The Money Store and Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, I've come to understand Fevers and Mirrors' magnetism as an example of how I'm drawn to records where something really feels like it's at stake, records that sound unstable. That's certainly the case here. Up to this point, Oberst had released some decent material culminating in Letting Off the Happiness (his On Avery Island to Fevers' In the Aeroplane Over the Sea), but beyond that, his work as Commander Venus and solo was mostly notable for the youth of the person who made it. It was all very precocious and little of it stands up now.

Still, in 2000, it put Oberst at the center of concentric, radioactive areas anticipating their impending "moment": oversharing culture, emo, Omaha, Saddle Creek, Bright Eyes. It's here where the weight of being essentially synonymous with Bright Eyes starts to dawn on Oberst, and fortunately for the listener, there was no separation between where he was an artist and as a person. Yes, it's a record about breaking up (that is, if your affections are requited in the first place), unfulfilled dreams, real nightmares, the burden of talent, and the encroaching dread of a future where nothing substantial ever changes within you. All of the things that get judged as #whitepeopleproblems by other white people who apparently had their shit together before they could legally drink. Play Fevers and Mirrors for someone who served in a war or underwent a serious medical procedure, and they'd probably tell Oberst to snap out of it. Indeed, you learn later in your years that, as Morrissey put it, "there are worse things in life than never being someone's sweetie," but in the thrall of Fevers, sometimes these are the kind of things that do feel like the end of the world for at least an hour.

Focus on his imperfect pitch, and, yes, Oberst isn't a technically proficient singer. But on Fevers, he became remarkable at controlling how he wants to express himself while appearing no more capable of controlling what he's feeling than he is the sun-- another symbol used throughout Mirrors, mostly envied for the pathetic predictability of its rise and fall. Like many of his LPs that would follow, Fevers begins with a very long and quiet solo performance overlain by sampled dialogue, and within five minutes, Oberst has no idea why he's even bothering, heavily sighing through one of the many perfect syntheses of thought and tone: "Once the page of a calendar turns it's no more/ So tell me then what was it for?" This demonstration of nihilism is short-lived obviously, and the rest of Fevers is spent purposefully thrashing within the straitjacket of one's self.

It's unfairly criticized as one-note whining, but on the contrary, Fevers is a record where seemingly every form of self-loathing is in play. It starts immediately after Oberst's premature epitaph with "The Calendar Hung Itself…", a streaking, disintegrating comet of emotional immolation. I don't think Oberst ever got as purely angry as he did here, and no matter what vitriol he spewed at the government, the social contract, or an errant lover from there on out, nothing could compare to the hatred he turned on himself. There's a bit of Elliott Smith's plainspoken catatonia on "Something Vague", where Oberst sighs, "now and again, it seems worse than it is/ But mostly the view is accurate." By "Haligh, Haligh, a Lie, Haligh", he manages a chuckle at the futility of trusting in another, but sarcasm proves to be a terrible defense mechanism; a friend tells him on the phone, "no, it's just some guy she's been hanging out with/ I don't know, the past couple weeks I guess," and in repeating those words, Oberst's voice cracks with the quiver of a young man having to carry on a conversation as if he's not being slowly robbed of his will to live.

So, absolutely-- Fevers and Mirrors is the kind of record you're meant to commiserate with, or at the very least, let its misery make your own seem kinda manageable. But let's be perfectly clear that there's actual music on this thing too, and rarely is it less than fantastic. Thus far, Oberst's career has been bookended by an ambition to tap into the eternal truth of folk music, and there are vestiges of public-domain melodies that can't help but pour out when using a certain progression: "A Song to Pass the Time" sidles awfully close to "The Gambler", "Something Vague" morphs into a close reading of "No Woman, No Cry". And yet Oberst, his band, and house producer Mike Mogis create something wholly identifiable as a "Saddle Creek sound," testing their capabilities for a deceptively diverse and always engaging sonic experience.

Looking back, what stands out is how little relation it has to emo or just about anything. There is no Fugazi in Bright Eyes, no Sunny Day Real Estate, no punk rock, to be honest. And there's no Bob Dylan either and crucially much less Jeff Mangum than in the past, at least musically. Some songs here ride a single melody for their entirety in service of Oberst's words; others explode into nimble choruses, and the arrangements are every bit as volatile as the narrator: "The Calendar Hung Itself…" moves in lockstep with Oberst's breathless and nervy howling, its Latin churn interrupted by buzzing G-funk synths, clinking percussion, and before its climactic verse, what sounds like Q-bert falling to his death. "Sunrise, Sunset" predates Beirut's fixation with klezmer but finds little comfort in nostalgia, punctuated by distorted pummeling and rupturing Fevers' quieter second half. The opening line of electric piano on "The Movement of a Hand" undergoes subtle mitosis throughout its four minutes, accumulating an unnerving alien beauty as it layers over itself. Though hardly a big-budget affair, Mogis' production sounds absolutely perfect in recreating the scenes set by Oberst's lyrics, warm and tactile but with an unsettling cabin fever effect-- long overdue for this vinyl reissue. Intoning, "this barren land is alive tonight," "Arienette" reimagines the Omaha plains as a claustrophobic hell filled with bloodthirsty predators and paranoid prey, "Haligh, Haligh, a Lie, Haligh" mills about a disheveled apartment, "When the Curious Girl Realizes She Is Under Glass" bangs at a piano in drunken disgust. Like many other teen headphone symphonies, from Dark Side of the Moon to Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Fevers and Mirrors is a world unto itself, even if it just happens to be a somewhat large city stuck in the middle of Nebraska.

While we're on the subject of how Fevers creates its own universe, at this point, we must talk about "An Attempt to Tip the Scales". The song itself is perfectly fine, if one of Fevers' least substantial. Nah, this is all about the radio interview. I debated whether or not to put that in quotes because I think there is value to the fact that some listeners continue to believe it's real. But, spoiler alert: Knowing that the DJ is actually Matt Silcock of labelmates Lullaby for the Working Class and "Conor Oberst" is played by Todd Fink of the Faint rightfully puts it alongside "The $20 Sack Pyramid" and "Welcome to Purple Haze" as one of the funniest skits ever put to tape. The rapport between the sycophantic, unprepared DJ and the pissy, entitled artist gets increasingly more hysterical as it goes along, and for the ease of transcription, I'll quote only the jokes made at Oberst's expense, of which there are many: "My mother drowned one [brother] every year for five consecutive years. They were all named Padraic… they all got one song," "I want people to feel sorry for me. I like the feel of the burn of the audience's eyes on me when I'm whispering all my darkest secrets into the microphone." It drives home the point that, like most young adults, Oberst can sense the ridiculousness of his own bullshit even while in progress; earlier on "The Center of the World", completely dumbfounded by his own inability to cope with seemingly trivial circumstances, he's left to scream "THIS ISN'T HAPPENING! HAPPENING! HAPPENING!" It bears repeating: on a record often accused of taking itself too seriously, its creator allows his friends to conduct what's basically a five-minute roast. As such, it's the ultimate embodiment of the record's title, holding a mirror up to Oberst's critics who said he needs to get over himself.

The There Is No Beginning to the Story EP is included in this reissue, and it functions less as an appendage to Fevers than a commencement speech on a stage of Oberst's artistic development. In very tangible ways, it sets the stage for Lifted-- for one thing, its title and several lyrics sprinkled throughout are quoted later on, and most obvious is "From a Balance Beam", the first song on There Is No Beginning and one that would also appear on Lifted. Though undoubtedly the work of Conor Oberst, it wouldn't fit on Fevers at all-- the production sounds noticeably more expensive, with Mogis learning how to apply a cool shimmer to mandolins, field snares, and most crucially Oberst's voice. More notably, "From a Balance Beam" is every bit as wordy and fatalistic as what came before, but whether it's the melody (one of the best Oberst has written) or just the breezy ambience, it actually sounds incredibly optimistic.

It's by and large the best thing here, which isn't to say the EP's not worth your time. There Is No Story just can't help but be dwarfed by its immediate surroundings. Nonetheless, it does give insight to the places where Bright Eyes would go in the future-- "Messenger Bird's Song" anticipates the overreaching, tremulous intimacy of I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, while "We Are Free Men" indicates the deeper, more theatrical vocals Oberst would experiment with on Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. It also contains seedlings for a couple of melodies he would incidentally reprise. "Loose Leaves" is a rare time where he obscures his words with a distorted microphone, which is a shame as the lyrics point toward an incisive snark that outward-looking records like Cassadaga and The People's Key couldn't quite manage without sounding pedantic. It closes on a Neil Young cover, which is less important for how it's executed than what it meant: Oberst was starting to place himself within the lineage of rock royalty and deal with the expectations that came from outside his immediate group of friends and collaborators. It's the fissure that ultimately separates everything that came before and after for Bright Eyes.

So is Fevers and Mirrors the best Bright Eyes record? Some days I think it is, but the important thing is that Oberst gives you options, and just about everything he's done since-- even the hamfisted political punk of Desaparecidos and the misguided democracy of the Mystic Valley Band-- is at the very least an attempt not to repeat himself. He's become oddly undervalued even if I doubt whether he has another masterpiece in him. Depending on my mood, I prefer the monomaniacal scale of Lifted or the electro-goth narcosis of Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, and I get what others see in I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, a record I find to be highly overrated on account of its playing by someone else's rules for once-- it was there where Oberst really attempted to be the "next Dylan" or "next Gram Parsons" rather than the only Conor Oberst. Which is exactly what we got on Fevers and Mirrors, a record steeped in roots, yet wholly of the moment, intelligent but prone to indefensible emotion, a very personal work made amongst talented friends. Most people discover Fevers and Mirrors at a time when they're being bombarded with the canon, and the recognition of something that feels utterly yours instead of received wisdom created a true cult of admirers and imitations who had the same white-light experience as myself: When I first heard Fevers and Mirrors, it sounded exactly like the kind of music I'd want to make. Thankfully, Bright Eyes did it, so I didn't have to.