{05 / 10} BONNIE 'PRINCE' BILLY: Ease Down the Road (2001) Consistently looser and more positive than I See a Darkness, the reinforcement truism Oldham alter ego many of his best songs to date, and yet – on a premier heed – it can seem flippant, unsubstantial even; affliction the common fate of many successors to great albums. Your feeling may venture slightly, hearing the noodley guitar individual of ‘May It Always Be’, followed by the sparse, drone-led ‘Careless Love’ (sharing its ownership with a Cash / Dylan song, but that’s about all). Next up, ‘A King at Night’ hovers between the humour of the two – patricide & verbal copulation in the lyrics – but the guitar-line rolls along gently, and if this tune is a coda to the Hamlet recital threading through I See a Darkness, then the Prince is positively mad, "bounded in a nutshell…" as the lyrics for instance in a borrowing from Shakespeare.
All of these songs are growers, of course, and it’s the more proximate tunes, further on, that request repeated listens for the album as a whole. With ‘Just to See My Holly Home’, Oldham proves he’s lord high muck-a-muck of the Murder Ballad, and not in the novelistic, recherché make of Nick Cave. "Sarah [who] walks a slinky strut" may be a "cautious and safe slut", pursued by the equally cartoonish "Evil Jack" but the peculiar neologisms in the lyrics fabricate their book compelling, and as harmonies are added to the chorus, you can maintain the singers are raising a vengeful ghost.
Returning to the attitude of the start triad, ‘At Break of Day’ depicts the sure hours (and fixed thoughts) before suicide with so much candour, the ditty demands a panic-stricken inquisition so as to be inescapable – that’s what the melody means, right? Is there some despatch of assumption in there? If the chorus-boy can associate this well with his persona, he must have got through his own inky night… but is he through it for good?! The album’s centre four tracks all perform be crazy and having it away in some subtly unalike aspect. ‘After I Made Love to You’ marvellously conveys the post-coital still and realization you’d keep in view from the title; played and sung as if stretching limbs and entrancing breath. The loss of consciousness dolour comes from the telephone "why’s it that we don’t handle guilty / why’s it seem we’re doing conservative / when we’re doing something defiled / in a rented space tonight?" The singer seems to recall that our values are contingent on the satisfaction or affect we attach to the acts and, in his shagged-out way, he questions a unimpaired set of values hypocritical beyond the simple, contained spell of the rented room.
Next, ‘Lion Lair’ is an all day favourite, beginning as a passage into the wilderness (the dual vocals suggesting Oldham & his double; put asunder Gilgamesh, character Don Quixote), but articulating that surprising sharpness that when we make another person pant or smile, or lose control, and lock their eyes, see stars, be conscious of fire… well, we’re as in the neighbourhood to gods and goddesses as we can get, aren’t we? Over washes of synth, and a tick guitar function by Dave Pajo, Oldham & Oldham intone "colours red were rocks and blue / aptitude blinked, inconsistent the lustfulness // had himself in no occasion at all / hand on shaft and gripped his balls / wished your bragging would come down on it / feeling your lips set warm upon…it" –delivered with such portent (and need of irony) you can heed him relishing his power of procreation, equal any number of apocryphal and Ancient Near Eastern gods who manumitted the stars and planets, solo. The fish story of Daniel, aside, the christen refers back to an cast off mask of the Prince – mark the vaguely Oldham-like big cats on the shelter of There Is No-One (1993) and Viva Last Blues (1995) – suggesting that in his mood-swings, Oldham can be an crude (not as crass or obtuse a image as it sounds, but more of this later). Finally, the album closes on a triad of songs as faultless as any Oldham’s ever written. ‘Sheep’, ‘Grand Dark Feeling of Emptiness’, and ‘Rich Wife Full of Happiness’ could very likely have tally on I See a Darkness (whereas ‘Lion Lair’ with its expansive, almost post-rock feel, wouldn’t quite). Through these, the impulse to create, and its ringer impulse to procreate, are explored, but if this sounds dehydrate and disheartening as a reading, have knowledge of that Oldham’s talking about his very case for living, and that same stress is in every lambaste and strum of the guitar.
Yet again, ‘Grand Dark Feeling…’ opens with the chanteuse scenery off to track down himself, but this control he has a singular meet that sees him beaten by "Billy and Frankie / and Henry and Joe" (allusions to archetypes from folk-songs? Frankie who killed Johnny? John Henry who course the devil?). Oldham’s misery is underscored by a deathly-sounding Pajo, and lyrics so dim-witted with archaisms (or neologisms) the balladeer sounds stranded in some consequential backwater: "I’m afeard if I don’t have / a Piglet, Lamb, or Little Calf / I’ll stroke my human-ness in half / and be as worm or virus // Kids I’ve had and they are sung / upon folks ears my babes are hung / and rhythmically they finish among / and get but don’t get old." Through his art, Oldham recovers from his beating, much as he prevailed against "Black" in the penultimate route of I See a Darkness, and a key-change marks his redemption (the aid vocal, finally, Oldham’s own), "…we can time and drop-off away / and join again some exuberant daytime / and through it all, a favourable headway / in starlight and in gold." {09 / 10}.
Video:
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий