1998

Will Oldham

Tivoli Hotel

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

After a succession of albums as the Palace Brothers, Palace Music or just plain old Palace, Will Oldham is now travelling under his own passport. With a current CD, Joya (Shock Records) and a compilation Lost Blues and Other Songs, Oldham is presently giving us plenty of opportunity to peruse his singular talents. His music is fragile and perilous. With scraps of elliptical lyrics intoned in his high pitched, mewling tenor Oldham gathers together musicians who scratch and plunk and drone their meandering way through, and under, and beyond, the boundaries of what we used to call songs.

His works are a mix of Appalachian ballad, cowboy lament, private revenges, meditations and cut-up. The music is a tangle of modal loops and shunting rhythms. Will Oldham is the keeper of the minor keys to the kingdom. It is a sound both refreshingly new and strikingly archaically simple. And one that has echoes in early Leonard Cohen, the dour pieties of the Carter family, Ballad in Plain D Dylan, even the winding near-miss voices of the Incredible String Band. If Loudon Wainwright was just starting out now he might well have been a weird little aesthete like this. Somehow it is not surprising to read, in an interview for Grip Monthly, Will Oldham recalling as a kid being nicknamed Will Robinson. After the family in Lost in Space.

At the Tivoli, backed by Jim White and Mick Turner of Dirty Three, along with a keyboard player with Tim Buckley hair, Will Oldham is determined to break every protocol of stage presentation. In his brown suede jacket, skinny levis and Cuban heel boots Oldham is pale and intense, his thinning blond hair damp and his eyes bright and blue. We are reminded that he was once the fifteen year old actor who so brilliantly played the boy preacher-turned- unionist in Matewan, John Sayles’ splendid film about the West Virginia coal mining strikes in the 1920s.

But Will Oldham is not having any of that performance stuff. Ambling onstage  Oldham immediately demands that the lights are brought down to a point where he is barely discernible. His microphone has been hauled over to the edge of the stage and from there he conducts the band through a series of improvisations and sketches of his work. Nothing is introduced or explained, the set list seems somewhat approximate. Jim White hastily reaches down to look again at a scrunched up piece of paper before Oldham signals the drummer to lay down some more subtly etched patterns on which to layer Turner’s trickling guitar lines and the tinny plaintive chords from the Tim Buckley guy.

I gradually recognise stuff from the Joya album. Such as O Let it Be.  Will is Ferdinand. “I pick the flowers smell like a bull/ sniff at the summer a round nostril full. ” His rhymes are mannered, almost Elizabethan. The piano chimes, Turner’s guitar sounds a bit like Robby Krieger-moving from room to room. Oldham’s voice winds upwards to near falsetto and down again. In the boom of the murky sound mix his words are all but lost. Only the repetitions -“I can do without it. I can live without it”- emerge at all audibly. We are intrigued, we are straining forward. To hear, to see, to work out what is going on as he makes cryptic asides to the band.

Having just brought one song to unceremoniously abrupt closure, Oldham is suddenly strumming on his red Fender to no effect. He pouts, glares at the amp and suggests if we clap and believe in fairies maybe all will be well. Mick Turner, less given to believing in fairies, laconically wanders over to the rig and re-inserts a loose plug. Oldham laughs and pitches into Bolden Boke Boy.  It is more upbeat with a whiff of John Wesley Harding about it. The lyrics are characteristically evocative and impenetrable. Then, that final line about not having children has Will Oldham leading a little seminar with himself about the pros and cons of procreation. Be Still and Know God follows, and then a cover – In My Mind,  experts tell me, written by bad ol’ David Allen Coe.

It is almost impossible to hear it -the mix seems to be getting worse but Oldham sings with great feeling all the same. And then when it’s finished he interrogates the band about whether it’s a good or bad song. The Dirty Two looked bemused. What the fuck kind of question is that ? Jim White in his tight suit, with the shirt collar folded over the lapels like a fifties bookie, consults his list again. I mean,  Warren Ellis- the Dirty Three violin player, currently touring with the Bad Seeds- can be  full of surprises, but this Will Robinson is from another planet altogether.

The night has been both invigorating and frustrating. The crowd is on side, but increasingly tetchy. Just sing something, someone shouts, when Will starts rapping with the band again. We can’t hear you, shouts a woman, on the brink, it seems, of exasperated tears. Oldham plays Apocolypse, no (sic) and then New Gypsy. It is a marvellous song. Turner’s guitar lines ripple as White’s peerless brushwork gathers urgency. His percussion, heavy on the cymbalism and snare, is endlessly inventive. And Will Oldham, edgy and preoccupied, entunes his querulous lyrics, gnarled with inversions and dangling half rhymes. “You can lay me out a place/ it’s time I had some love/ have the ladies gather round and do me from above.”

The world is full of singers and songwriters but none quite as rare as Will Oldham. Like Michael Stipe he is a high strung Southerner, all the way from Louisville Kentucky and, as I have said, he makes few concessions to the expectations of the performance circuit. But his music is full of beguiling melancholy and strange truth. And, the more you listen to it, the more- like his namesake Will Robinson- you realise he is nowhere near as lost in space as you first suspected.

The Adelaide Review, No.173, February, 1998, p.38-9.