Music
Mere Mortals Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Matt Sweeney. Playing
May 2 at the Mercy Lounge
About two-thirds of the way through his recent live album, Summer in the Southeast, we hear Will Oldham—known often, and here, as Bonnie “Prince” Billy—lead his six-person band through the hushed but insistent groove that opens “Death to Everyone.”
Although significantly louder and more strident than the song’s original take, on Oldham/Billy’s 1999 album I See a Darkness, the first verse is still subdued compared to much of the ragged, gutty rock that surprisingly dominates Summer. The song’s rumbling force grows as Oldham and his musicians—guitarists David Bird, Pink Nasty and Matt Sweeney, keyboardist Ryder McNair, bass player (and brother) Paul Oldham and drummer Peter Townshend—pounce on the chorus as if pummelling an opponent they know to be their equal. “Death to everyone is gonna come,” he sings, the song’s gather-ye-rosebuds message gathering urgency in its newly electrified context.
As the chorus expires, McNair’s piano seizes the lead, while most of the other players drop out and back off the microphones. “La da da da da,” sings a now half-audible Oldham, and his bandmates respond, “Death to everyone.” “La da da da,” he repeats, and the band answers back: “Whoo!” For a few riveting seconds, Oldham achieves the Old Testament prophet status to which he’s always seemed to aspire; meanwhile, his bandmates have outright become the risen dead, dancing by firelight to celebrate the inescapable justice of mortality and the impending arrivals that will never stop adding to their number.
It’s a transportive moment, one of several on Summer in the Southeast. Recorded in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and North Carolina in 2004, Summer comes across as a twin to that year’s Greatest Palace Music, a collection of Oldham’s haunted, creaking Appalachian balladry re-recorded with slick Nashville session aces; both albums are restless reimaginings of a catalog that now goes back 14 years, under nearly as many monikers (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Bonny, Palace, Palace Brothers, Palace Songs and even his own name). More recently, Oldham’s holding pattern has continued through a full-length and EP co-billed with Sweeney and a covers album recorded with veteran Chicago indie-rockers Tortoise. (He’s currently at work on a new effort, slated for release this fall.)
Summer may be the most compelling entry in this transitional phase. It offers the idiosyncratic acoustic balladeer as traditional rock bandleader—albeit one who occasionally transcends the shopworn tropes with which he’s flirting here. Pacing is his surprise trump card: “Death to Everyone” is such a spellbinder because it’s preceded by a set list heavy with questions of devotion, supplication and erotic confusion that “Death” (and death) sweeps up and away. He pulls much the same trick earlier, slotting the unnerving sexual torture fantasy in “A Sucker’s Evening” immediately after the resigned “Break of Day,” making the former seem the inevitable violent outgrowth of the latter. Then, after the tense discomfort of “Evening” has broken, the longing for sensual comfort in the subsequent “Nomadic Revery” takes on a simmering sense of threat. The cohesion and sense of purpose heard throughout Summer in the Southeast suggest that, no matter how much he has meandered in the last few years, Oldham knows precisely where he’s going.
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