Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy

The Letting Go

(Drag City)

4.5 of 5 Stars



By ABE J. RIESMAN

CRIMSON STAFF WRITER



Will Oldham, whether singing as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Palace Music, or his own Christian name, likes his songs to exist outside of time.

So, anyone familiar with his voluminous catalog—equal parts confounding and transcendent—will know that something strange is afoot in the opening line of his new album.

“When the numbers / get so high / of the dead / flying through the sky,” he mumble-croons over soft strings and guitar strums, “Oh, I / don’t know why / love comes to me.”

Is this most oblique of songwriters singing about the War in Iraq? But after that line, it’s back to his usual lyrical tropes—troubled narrators with no names, men loving women they’re doomed to lose, and the dark, satanic sky that lights all roads at midnight.

But that opening line sticks with you. Something’s different.

For one thing, this is the most instrumentally fleshed-out and gorgeous album Oldham has created.

Recorded in Reykjavik, Iceland all the sounds, from the desperate bombast of “The Seedling” to the barely-whispered finger-picking of “Wai” have an icy purity befitting the Emily Dickinson poem—“After great pain a formal feeling comes”—from which the album gets its title (“First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go”).

Indeed, the standout track, “Cursed Sleep,” might be the most musically complex piece to ever carry Oldham’s name. Violins ascend while cellos spiral downwards, the melody darts from wall to wall in a careful pattern, and Dawn McCarthy’s counterpoint vocals plead out variations of the song’s title over and over and over again. Meanwhile, Will narrates a primordial, but endlessly complex, human scene: lovers lying in bed.

“I slept sweetly, unpretending / that the night was always ending / she breathed lightly, right next to me / and I dreamed of her inside of me.” Gender roles reversed in half-sleep, he tries to understand the universe they have created, and the swirling guitar and violin strings serve to show the profound anxiety that any love can bring.

And therein lies one of the most rewardingly complex facts of the album. It’s called “The Letting Go,” one of its ballads is called “Then The Letting Go,” and troubled loving permeates the scenery… but this isn’t a breakup album, at least not in the traditional sense.

This isn’t the earnest mediocrity of Beck’s “Sea Change” or the frozen narcissism of The Mountain Goats’ “Get Lonely.” Hell, you can argue that it’s more complex even than that magnum opus of breaking-it-off, Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks.”

Oldham (or his narrator—one can never be too sure with these poets) spends no time spiting his lover, screaming in agony, or even letting go, really.

In fact, the one time that he quotes the album title in lyrical form, it’s in the coda of “No Bad News,” when he shocks the listener by thanking his “little bird” for “not letting go of me when I let go of you.” The penultimate track is even named “I Called You Back,” for chrissakes.

So, what the hell is going on? And why did we have that oblique reference to Iraq in the opening line?

This might be stretching things a bit, but perhaps Oldham wants us to see that starting a relationship, like invading Iraq, is deceptively easy—you always get more than you bargain for; and that breaking up, like “stabilizing” Iraq, is full of false endings, unexpected alliances, sectarian violence, and strange returns to the status quo.

“Every time we kiss / we find ourselves in love again,” he croons on the last titled track. “The older that we get / we know that nothing else for us is possible / When I was quiet / I heard your voice in everything.”

“Nothing else”… does that mean an end? A continuation? We honestly don’t know.

This is a beautiful album, almost too beautiful to listen to, once you hear the subtly shocking truths beneath the surface. Romances are complicated businesses, and for once, we have an album that documents how breathtakingly inconclusive it can be when we try to conclude them.

—Reviewer Abe J. Riesman can be reached by email at riesman@fas.harvard.edu.