You could set your clock by him. Like some kind of agrarian song tiller, Will Oldham is a seasonal operator whose harvest falls every winter, January being market time. This year he’s gotten a little help on the farm from guitarist Matt Sweeney, and together they’ve come up with a batch of tunes that are by turns courtly, kinky and perverse.
Courtly because nobody does bended knee ballads and thou-and-thee vernacular quite like BPB. Kinky because the music is pocked with wood-knots, and next to unsentimental and bawdy love songs (‘Beast For Thee’, ‘Lift Us Up’), he’ll serve up a tune about spanking (‘What Are You’) that could be a whiskey-nosed Rhett Butler threatening to put bratty Scarlet over his knee and slap some colour back in her cheeks. Perverse because, just as Ease Down The Road was peppered with splutter-inducingly inappropriate guitar solos, this one kicks off with ‘My Home Is The Sea’, a sort of elongated southern rock opera (albeit with a doleful cast), and at a couple of points throughout the record there are rhyming Les Pauls and stacked harmonies that’d invoke the Allmans or the Eagles if they’d been stranded in Death Valley eating psychotropic cacti and attending tweaker parties with Nick Oliveri.
And if you’re an Oldham fan – and I am – you’ll need to own Superwolf for songs like ‘Blood Embrace’, a forensic examination of infidelity built around a descending Neil Young guitar line that acts as a sort of Victorian narrative to the unspeakable transgressions being committed upon the song’s body, and the closing ‘I Gave You’, wherein our hero offers himself up on the platter of a fragile melody to his betrothed and gets rebutted for his trouble.
So there we leave him in his Kentucky eyrie, a little fuller of beard and balder of head than last year, but basically busy and unbowed. We’ll be back next year for a haircut, a new set of britches and a little reinforcement on the boot heels.