“I Don’t Belong To Anyone”
Posted by: danhartland on: March 24, 2009
Beware, by Bonnie Prince Billy
I’ve had a conversation over at By Fuselage about the pros and perceived cons of Beware, the latest album from Will Oldham as Bonnie Prince Billy. ‘Prolific’ is a word attached to Oldham in almost anything written about him, and his corpus of work does indeed bloat with every passing year: there are twists and turns enough in his career that one might expect his fans to be ready to take anything. Still, as Rilo Kiley discovered, the one thing your fans might not accept is your trying to record something that sounds like money was spent on it.
The smoothness of the production here, and the neatness of the arrangements, has raised a few eyebrows, since previously Oldham has been known for eschewing the obvious traps of the alt.county field in which he unambiguously toils. Like Lambchop, Oldham’s americana estate has always had fewer fences than a Ryan Adams or a Gillian Welch, and this has sometimes obscured his obvious influences. Beware, on the other hand, often sounds like the album The Flying Burrito Brothers never made. If Oldham hasn’t quite rewritten Sin City for Generation Y, he has certainly been less evasive about liking it.
Yet imprisoned by these reference points Beware certainly is not: the sniffy reception the record has enjoyed in some quarters misses the point entirely that if your honky tonk song has a marimba solo in it, then it’s probably not mere pastiche. Indeed, ‘You Can’t Hurt Me Now’ begins with the lyric ‘I know everyone knows / The trouble I have seen’, as blunt an eschewal of the usual country motif of the uniquely pained trouabdor as you could ask for. Beware is a fascinating, sonically diverse record which hits its mark just right. For all Oldham’s talent, few of his previous albums have maintained both their tone and quality to such complete effect. That alone makes Beware worthy of more than the usual schmindie snobbery.
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[...] Yeah Yeahs’ memorable It’s Blitz!, and Magnolia Electric Company, The Decemberists and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy all released records worth a listen in 2009, too. Anyway, omission is the nature of the listing [...]
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‘We’ are Anna French and Dan Hartland. The Story and the Truth is a sort of inadequate catch-all term for what goes on here: we tend to talk about novels, history, food and fashion, politics and music, but there may also be photographs of soft toys and musicians. Stick around and see.
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Words We Like
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
An astounding work of collecting-as-art, this compendium of 800,000 weird words is easily one of the most consistent genre anthologies I have read. Heterodox yet focused, it is fated to be the canonical text of weird fiction studies for some time to come - and deservedly so. The first-rank stories here - and there are many, not a few - are not excellent weird fiction. They are simply some of the best 20th century writing available in any mode. Not without its faults - but that is, ahem, the nature of the beast. Essential.
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Sonik Kicks, by Paul Weller
I haven't paid much attention to Weller - an artist who hangs heavy in my musical tutelage - since 2000's Heliocentric, an album of diverse interests which felt like a shot of crisp elegance in that year of Steps and 'N Sync. The records that followed it - particularly Illumination - were enough, however, to make those achievements a distant memory. There have been rumblings of a renaissance - 22 Dreams got great reviews - but only the sounds of Sonik Kicks have brought me back. Energetic, fierce and, best of all, creative, this sounds like a record from a much younger man. Weller has a lesson or two in him yet.
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1 | Beware « Everything Is Nice
April 10, 2009 at 9:01 pm
[...] read the weekly Rough Trade mailout. Now I buy about four albums a year and I need Dan Hartland to remind me that a new Will Oldham record is [...]