Aongside gentlemen of similar vintage and taste such as Shane MacGowan and Nick Cave, Will Oldham (by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Palace Brother, or any other name) is a master of adapting traditional musical and linguistic idioms to post-punk sense and sensibilities. And like his bedfellows, Mr Oldham acts as an unintentional – even unwitting – medium through which those on their first growth of beard might investigate back roads mapped by Dylan and Johnny Cash, the blue yodellers, and further back again, the Scottish, English and Irish cartographers who linked Ozark fiddles with supernatural strains of Hawthorne and the kind of pilgrim dread last seen in Miller’s The Crucible.
On this album, Oldham has seen fit to revisit his Palace catalogue with a little help from assorted practical Nashville cats (doing for his songs what the Stray Gators did for Neil Young), but the only fundamental change is the ratio of spit to polish. Earliest Palace recordings were weeping tales of idlers contemplating chopping off their devil’s plaything hands, or showing up drunk at midnight mass. Here, he’s treated those threnodies to a new set of clothes, but the essential airs of guilt and self-loathing remain.
If anything, half the novelty of this enterprise is to hear Oldham essay his dour and fatalistic parables against big-haired female backing vocals (‘Pushkin’, ‘Agnes, Queen Of Sorrow’), an anomaly akin to Dylan spitting his Leviticus ire over borderline AOR circa Slow Train Coming. But no amount of mixing and fixing will ever plane the burrs off songs like ‘ New Partner’ or ‘You Will Miss Me When I Burn’. Plus, he does the greatest titles – I doubt even Hank could have gotten his chops around a hook like ‘I Am A Cinematographer’.
So, sometimes the salt of the old word rephrased equals the sugar of the new. Beware though: underneath the Nudie threads, here be monsters.