Bonnie "Prince" Billy: Beware!

As one might expect from an artist with quotes in one of a handful of his monikers, Will Oldham (aka Palace Brothers, Palace music, and Palace Songs) is a veritable peddler of musical red herrings. A good deal of Oldham’s charm is thanks to his tongue having taken up permanent residence in his cheek.

Beware is supposed to be his “big” album, for which he parted with his patently secretive ways in allowing pre-release media promotions. But it’s leaner than last year’s lush Lie Down in the Light, and arguably his most light-hearted offering to date. On the surface, that is. If we had to venture a guess as to what Will had in mind when titling Beware, we'd would say that perhaps he’s warning any newcomers to his music not to take the word of his sweet, folksy melodies alone- look to his wry, uneasy lyrics as well.

This masquerading of the uncanny and insecure behind 70s style country-rock chords and the pristine twang of his female chorals is a device Oldham’s loyal cult following (the force which has allowed him to forego the press almost entirely in debuting past albums) will appreciate. Unlike the dark post-punk navel-gazing that earned him his often fiercely literate following, this is polished Oldham, all dressed up for church. But he’s hardly singing Alleluias.

Beware’s opening track, “Beware Your Only Friend” calls the plays for the rest of the album: ‘I want to be/your only friend’ Oldham croons, then his background chorus merrily chimes in ‘is that scary?’ undermining the wholesomeness of this romantic ballad- perhaps questioning the wholesomeness of romantic trust at all. Following this chorus are lyrics which may just as well have come straight out of Stevie Smith’s poem "Not Waving but Drowning:” ‘picture us lounging/ just sitting and listening/ and loving what we hear/ that has never happened. We both flail too much/we flail too much/ to let the other near.’

Beware is an early highlight of the 2009 musical landscape. Moving even closer to the country genre than Appalachian-folk inspired Lie Down in the Light, Oldham seems less to be “progressing” in style than to be trying on new outfits for his enduring ennui. And the faux earnestness of this album is especially apropos in light of Oldham’s professed influence by Elvis Presley.

Still, there are traces of vintage Bonnie “Prince” Billy here- the moody track ‘There is Something I Have to Say” wouldn’t be out of place on 1997’s searing Joya. This is the gritty, laid-bare Oldham that his fans first adored, whose own emotional nakedness he addresses with ambivalence in Beware’s “You Can’t Hurt Me Now:” ‘I know everyone knows/ the trouble I’ve seen/ That’s the thing about trouble/ you can love.’ And this album expresses an incarnation of Will Oldham you can’t help but love- the tragically beautiful exiled monarch “Bonnie” Prince Charlie meets Billy The Kid. -Rachael Sawyer

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