BEFORE EMBARKING upon one of the more, eh, idiosyncratic musical careers of our time, Will Oldham had a brief career as a TV-movie actor. In one of his roles, he was called upon to play the father of a little girl who'd fallen down a well. On the film set, as soon as the real father got a good look at Oldham, he was heard to protest, "Hey, I don't look that weird!"

The guy's records are even weirder. Imagine a musical backdrop of sparse, bled-white, Joni-Mitchell-meets-Joy-Division country ... western, sprinkled with the barest garnishing of blues, and topped off by the singing of a frail, desolate, cracked-as-a-dry-pitcher voice which makes Neil Young sound like Jack L. I See A Darkness is his first work under the Bonnie "Prince" Billy alias, and despite its title, I have it on good authority from a couple of friends who happen to be Oldham obsessives that this is probably his most accessible record to date, which makes you wonder what the others must have been like.

But look beyond the horrible sleeve artwork and the absurdly portentous titles ('Another Day Full Of Dread', 'Death To Everyone', 'Today I Was An Evil One'), and what emerges is a record with a heart full of hope. We get perhaps the clearest inkling of this on the title track, where Oldham sings in his oddly touching off-key vibrato, "And then I see a darkness / and did you know how much I love you / is there hope that somehow you can save me / from this darkness?"

Behind the relative jauntiness of songs like 'A Minor Place', though, lurks Oldham's barely suppressed other, an inability to be at peace with himself which frequently break through on the likes of 'Another Day Full Of Dread': "Well, I like to have a good time / any of my friends will tell you / so if you confront me with stupidity / I'm doubly angry at you". The delicately beautiful 'Black', meanwhile, deals with mental illness in Oldham's own inimitable fashion ("Black, you are my enemy / and I cannot get close to thee . . . I love you, for it's meant to be / I weaken your attack").

The suspicion persists that Oldham is deliberately playing up to his public image as an in-bred loner who composes his songs while sitting on his porch in Louisville, gibbering at the moon in between swigs of bourbon. Hence the seemingly self-parodic song titles mentioned above, and his readiness to write frankly silly lines like "the scars from last year's storm rest like maggots on my arm" ('A Minor Place').

My only real problem with Oldham's music is his refusal to cloak his frequently astonishing words in anything but the stark, spartan musical arrangements on most of the songs. And if this is him at his most musically opulent, as seems to be the case, then the unlistenability of his previous records must have verged on the grotesque.

That apart, I See A Darkness is an intriguing and frequently superb album, far better than the interminable 40 minutes of spindly croaking and mumbling I'd been expecting - mind you, I still wouldn't relish sitting next to this guy on the bus.