Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning (2005)
This is contemporary folk music that tells stories. The opening track begins with a spoken word tale of a doomed airliner that segues nicely into the song. Several tracks have really nice backing musicians playing mandolin, steel guitar, drums and trumpet on the last song. Several songs also have a female backing vocalist that is pretty good. The main problem with this is the lead singer's vocals. He sings with a quavering voice which gets really annoying after about 2 minutes. It's like he's trying to make you take the lyrics seriously by sounding angsty, but he just ends up shitting all over what would otherwise be pretty decent music. The slower songs where he is singing solo with his guitar (without the band) are especially bad (Lua is probably the low point here). I'm giving this a 4/10.