The country-fried I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning is filled with his simplest, most elegant talking points. Though he's earnestly yearning sometimes ("First Day of My Life"), Oberst is more imbued with sad-eyed sarcasm than ever. "I could've been a famous singer if I had someone else's voice / But failure's always sounded better," he sings on "Road to Joy" (which, yes, steals its riffs from Beethoven's Ninth). Self-immolation and skewered romanticism with picayune detail and rich humor becomes him best on "

Lua," a picturesque tale of a drug-fueled romance with a set of lyrics harder to kick than crack.

For all of Awake's folksy glory, the electronic synth-phonic Digital Ash in a Digital Urn is strangely more in tune with the songwriter's familiar achy-break-iness. Don't let the shiver in his voice fool you. From toughened, chilly irony ("Light Pollution") to iced-over loneliness ("Hit the Switch"), the gray-backlit grandeur of Digital sounds closer to Oberst than ever imaginable. —A.D. Amorosi
Bright Eyes plays Fri., Jan. 28, 8 p.m., $28, with Tilly and the Wall and Coco Rosie, Academy Of Music, Broad and Locust sts., 215-893-1999.

Kate Gaffney
Highways
(TiredWired)
Philly's Kate Gaffney is not one of those wispy singer-songwriters who laments deep, deep troubles with a butterfly voice and wallflower melodies. The first plucked, brooding notes on her Highways EP let you know she's down there in the dust with the beaten down people she's singing about. Which makes sense; it's her personal pains and ponderings that propel most of the lyrics. Gaffney's voice walks a mysterious middle range, somewhere between the bluesy depths of Tracy Chapman and the white-wine clarity of Natalie Merchant. So, where other acoustic artistes try to take you on cross-country drives and into smoky bars with their helpless words alone, Gaffney can build to a roaring, soaring chorus and put you anywhere she wants. —Patrick Rapa
Kate Gaffney plays Fri., Jan. 28, 7:30 p.m., free before 8 p.m., $7 after, with Andrew Lipke, Grape Street Pub, 4100 Main St., Manayunk, 215-483-7084.

M83
Before the Dawn Heals Us
(Mute)
There didn't seem to be anywhere for French electro-soundscapist Anthony Gonzalez to go. M83's 2003 sophomore disc Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts was such an enormously grand statement — what with its synthesizers, strings, ghostly vocals and propulsive beats — merely holding steady seemed unlikely. But Before the Dawn Heals Us sees Gonzalez amicably part ways with co-conspirator Nicolas Fromageau and up the ante. Playing most of the instruments here, Gonzalez further unites the worlds of ethereal electronica, fuzzy shoegaze and '80s synth pop in a way that is simply devotional. Walking the street as the pulsing synth tones and angelic siren song of "Teen Angst" swirl through ear buds is like church. The simply titled "6." interrupts surges of knifing guitars and blistering drum kicks with a series of sudden silences before leaping right back into chaos. The album is rife with incidental noises and snatches of dialogue, a nod to the conceit that electronic music is inherently background fare. It's a notion Gonzalez roundly blows out of the water. —Brian Howard

Julia Fordham
That's Live
(Vanguard)
You gotta keep expectations low when you stumble across a live album from a cult artist — especially one as mellow as Brit Julia Fordham (a longtime favorite of the Tin Angel crowd). But this live recording (which has an accompanying DVD), shows the jazz-influenced Fordham doing what she does best: charming an audience with her passionate, crystalline vocals and finely wrought songwriting. Recorded last summer at a Los Angeles House of Blues show, the 16-song disc features India.Aire (dueting on a soulful rendition of "Concrete Love") and a full band that, fortunately, never overpowers Fordham's silky voice. Producer Larry Klein's light touch enhances both the immediacy and warmth of Fordham's 20-year catalog of ballady songs, while showing off the artistic diversity of this underrated talent. —Nicole Pensiero

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