| |
|
I don't own as much as I'd like (or enough to really go sticking up a huge long post about it, not that I'm going to let that stop me), but I've been trying to figure out precisely what it is about Oldham's music that hooks me in.
Firstly, that it's dreary isn't strictly true. Some of it is, certainly, but that's by no means true of the majority of it. There's a playfulness to much of what he does. The All Most Heaven EP, for example - which is a bit of an alternative supergroup project, involving Oldham, Rian Murphy, Albini, Jim O'Rourke, Bill Callaghan, Laetitia Sadler, and so on - is silly-grin enjoyable, O'Rourke's odd '60s Bacharach pop production (think his Eureka album: lush string arrangements and jaunty, swelling rhythms) married to nonsense lyrics (We held upon a biggun daddy hates to / The song fell on the gable; ah-ee stood ape-hole).
There's also a dark humour to most, if not all, of those songs that could initially be thought to be dreary. As far as his earlier, Palace-era output goes, there's the inbred horse-loving hick that became a cliche and is played as such, but with far more empathy for the character than that suggests. There's the wooziness of Drinking Woman, or the low-fi camp fire singalong of Big Balls. I suppose it's a matter of letting yourself enter that world, that headspace, but 'dreary' tracks like No More Rides and Take However Long You Want are downbeat pillows of enveloping sound, to my ears.
None of that makes any sense, I now realise.
As far as his Bonnie 'Prince' Billy records go, I still think that I See a Darkness is the most coherent and complete. Musically, it's not like anything else out there; a 17th century folk music. It also highlights one of Oldham's other major talents - his use of words. His eloquence is a constant throughout his career - amazing turns of phrase that knock you back when you actually start listening to them. And for this album, BPB is as much a character as Stable Will or the drunk preacher (who's a sick drunk, rather than Nick Cave's raging drunk).
It's dark, yeah, but it's funny dark. Or rather, it's funny dark if you want to read it as funny dark. That's one of the other things - the nature of what you take away from Oldham's songs often depends on what you bring to them. The skull in the moon on the cover is grinning at the listener as much because it knows there's a streak of comedy inherent in death, misery, drunken loneliness and fatal disease as it is because it isn't capable of pulling any other faces. Today I Was an Evil One?
That's not to say that it's all that dark, of course. The title track, for example, contains these elements in abundance, but also has a very human warmth, a sense of empathy and pity to it.
Add in the way the closing track's a love song that speaks of heartbreak, self-deluded hopefullness and beauty in under two minutes and you've got a classic record, right there.
Ease Down the Road fills out the sound with warm production and backing vocals and is possibly more affecting than .. Darkness as a result. Er... now that I'm listening to it again, I don't know if the previous album is the best out of the BPB stuff - they all cover such different ground that it's difficult to say. The next, Master and Everyone pulls back from the fullness of the sound in Ease..., but does so without going back to the pitch black of .. Darkness. The songs here all have softer sensibilities than before - they're as close to straight love songs as he's come. Rothkoid (at least, I think it was Roth) was bang on when he said that Master and Everyone contains Oldham's best BPB song in Hard Life - you can't take the words "It's a hard life for a man with no wife" entirely seriously, so the humour's still there in a sense, but it's another character piece, and as such you completely believe that the guy's honestly finding it hard because of that. Again, this astonishingly clever mix comes about because of Oldham's wonderful way with words, but also because the music fits them so beautifully.
And there's more. One With the Birds (off the Blue Lotus Feet EP) is a close relative, in terms of tune and structure, to Gram Parsons' Hickory Wind (Oldham had apparently never heard the older track before somebody pointed out the similarity). Listening to it, I can imagine Parsons singing it, and not because of that coincidence. It has the ache of a Parsons track, the longing.
So... recommendations. The three BPB albums I've talked about, for a start. Palace Music's Arise, Therefore. The rarities collection Guarapero/Lost Blues 2. If you can find them, the collaborations with Rian Murphy (All Most Heaven) and the Marquis de Tren (Dirty Three's Mick Turner - Get on Jolly, which I've not talked about here, but sounds a little like Gastr Del Sol). You can probably do without Ode Music, by the way - it's an alrightish-I-suppose instrumental release, but is entirely disposable.
If you've heard Dave Pajo's Whatever, Mortal (released as Papa M) and like that, you'll like Oldham's releases, especially his BPB records. And if you haven't heard Pajo's record but have heard and liked those by Oldham, you'll like that too. So buy it. Now. |
|
|
