Topic: Wink Wink 2011 - A bit of a change this year (Read 722838 times)

Algernon · « **Reply #1050 on:** 11 Oct 2011, 12:26 »

Real Estate - Days (2011)

http://www.M/F.com/?2hekb14o6iil4ao
Out of Tune

Pretty sure this is just a webrip from the NPR First Listen, but it's still decent sound quality and well worth a listen. Not a big departure from their previous stuff, maybe some tighter songwriting. I'm enjoying it.

valley_parade · « **Reply #1051 on:** 12 Oct 2011, 08:58 »

This is the album that's getting me through a really boring Wednesday in the office.

5bow · « **Reply #1052 on:** 13 Oct 2011, 12:23 »

Bonnie Prince Billy - Wolfroy Goes to Town 320 kbps

Pitchfork review
Perhaps the most conventional story Will Oldham has to tell is his own. As a teenager in the late 1980s, he moved from his hometown of Louisville to Hollywood, where he struggled as an actor before eventually landing a small role in John Sayles' Matewan and a larger role in a TV movie about Jessica McClure. Oldham soon defected to music, writing songs first under the Palace set of monikers and later as Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Twenty years later, while he still takes the occasional role, Sayles and McClure represent the poles of his subjects: His songs, often in a skewed country or folk tradition, are full of darkly American oddities and characters trapped down in their own metaphorical wells.

Oldham's film career continues to inform his music, as he writes songs as soliloquies and inhabits them the way an actor might perform a dramatic role, transforming dialog and stage direction into something flesh-and-blood, memorable, and moving. He writes in isolation and hires a small cast of backing musicians to help him bring these one-act songs to life. For his latest Bonnie "Prince" Billy album, Wolfroy Goes to Town, he's chosen a cast of regulars, including guitarist Emmett Kelly. Most of the Wolfroy troupe, like composer/multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily and Chicago-based singer-songwriter Angel Olsen, have toured with him for a while now, and backed him on many of his most recent records. Together, they give these new songs a soft, casual vibe, and the minimal instrumentation-- mostly acoustic guitars and bass-- evokes a dark, bare stage.

Oldham places the hardiest emphasis on vocals-- not just his own, but those of his players. His female duet partners have tended to act as his opposites, the coo of their voices offsetting his weathered creak. But on Wolfroy, Olsen sounds just as odd and ragged as he does. There may be no spark of contrast between them, but there's a spark nonetheless, and she's one of the most grounded female characters on any Bonnie "Prince" Billy record. The rest of the band's harmonies are rough and pointedly unrehearsed, barely holding together on "Black Captain" and "Quail and Dumplings". Rustic, however, does not mean primitive. "Cows" ends with a sophisticated vocal roundelay that has more in common with British folk than with its American counterpart. It's a lovely moment-- a spare, hushed, and unexpected coda.

Oldham's music is deeply attuned to the past and to the people we imagine inhabited it, yet his actorly approach separates him from the mainstream Americana crowd, who tend to favor a more autobiographical approach, or at least some sense of direct confessionalism. Oldham's songs are only obliquely about himself, and they rarely reveal much about the man singing them. "As boys, we fucked each other," he sings at the beginning of "New Tibet". "As men, we lie and smile." In other hands, such a line might deliver a shock to interrupt the lull of the music, but Oldham never breaks character. That f-bomb becomes part of the lull, and is not so much sung as ruefully breathed. The song possesses all the ruminative gravity of "I See a Darkness" and in tone and character could be interpreted as a sequel.

Heroes hold no interest for Oldham, who is much more concerned with the moral tangles of everyday people, like the character in "Quail and Dumplings" who promises a bright future of full bellies and no worries. Despite the subject matter, it's almost impossible to read that song strictly as a 2010s recession anthem, although it certainly derives some power from current conditions. Oldham's antiquated diction and sepia-toned details-- "one day it's going to be quail and dumplings for we"-- removes the song from the present and sets the characters deep in some imagined past. In one sense, it robs the song of any topical gravity, but in another, he allows "Quail and Dumplings" to transcend any one era.

By this point in his career, Oldham seems to realize that it's difficult for his audience to hear his songs outside of the context of his previous albums and incarnations. So he plays that up on Wolfroy, both by shifting away from the fuller sound of his recent albums, and by subtly alluding to his own characters. By now it's esoteric, but hardly a simple retread of past glories. Instead, that sense of connectedness lends these songs a reassuring familiarity, as though they were new corners of a strange world whose boundaries grow larger and whose scenery grows more inviting with every Oldham release.

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Author Topic: Wink Wink 2011 - A bit of a change this year (Read 722838 times)

5bow

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