This was Will
Oldham’s first album recorded under the name of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy in
1999. It kicks off with the singalong A
Minor Place which features weedy organ in the background. Better is follow up track Nomadic Revery (All
Around), with gloriously undisciplined vocals where Oldham sounds like a 90
year old man. The playing across these
and other tracks is subtle and spare, nothing is too overdone.
The title
track is the centerpiece, it’s a kind of a quiet, brooding, creeping song
(covered a year later by Johnny Cash), and probably the most ‘backwoodsy’,
quintessentially Oldham song. Much of
the material is quite dark, as evidenced by the titles – Another Day Full of Dread,
Death to Everyone, Today I Was An Evil One, and the Appalachian folk-style Black
– yet most have the melodies are highly memorable.
It’s not all
downbeat, Madeleine-Mary rollicks along with a loping beat and the
aforementioned Today I Was An Evil One is relatively sprightly. This album is the one by which all Oldham’s
future works have been judged, and as such, is a little overrated. He was, however, doing that ‘log cabin’ thing
years before Bon Iver brought it to the masses, and this album is a good
example of this.
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