June 12, 2009, 8pm
Capitol Theatre
Vern Riffe Center
77 S. High Street
(614) 469-1045
$18 in advance / $20 at door + TicketMaster charges
No TicketMaster charges at the CAPA box office, Used Kid’s Records or Magnolia Thunderpussy.
No door surcharges for those under 21.
Bonnie Prince Billy
http://www.myspace.com/princebonniebilly
After his stints performing as Palace, Palace Songs, Palace Brothers, and under his own name throughout the ’90s, by the end of the decade Will Oldham seemed to finally settle on the Bonnie “Prince” Billy moniker as the main outlet for his work. Regardless of the name he used to release his music or the musicians supporting him, Oldham’s style remained largely the same, pitting shambling and often sparse music against his creaky, world-weary voice and literate lyrics. The Louisville, KY, native worked as an actor during the late ’80s and early ’90s, starring in John Sayles’ 1987 mining film Matewan and appearing in the 1989 TV movie Everybody’s Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure and the 1991 big-screen film Thousand Pieces of Gold.
Oldham debuted as a musician in 1992 with the Drag City single Ohio River Boat Song, which he released as Palace Songs; his debut album, There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You, arrived the following year as a Palace Brothers offering. By 1995’s Viva Last Blues he was beginning to work as Palace Music, a name that stuck until 1997’s Joya, which Oldham released under his own name. However, with 1998’s Black Dissimulation and the following year’s I See a Darkness, the Bonnie “Prince” Billy name seemed to stick, for the most part: aside from the soundtrack Ode Music and Guarapero: Lost Blues 2, the majority of Oldham’s work from then on was credited to Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Ease Down the Road arrived in early 2001, featuring collaborators David Pajo, Catherine Irwin, Mike Fellows, and Harmony Korine. Master and Everyone appeared two years later. In 2004 came the release of a rather surprising project for Oldham — Bonnie “Prince” Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music, in which his usual collaborators were joined by a band of Nashville session musicians for a set of polished re-recordings of songs from his back catalog.
Oldham’s next project found him collaborating with guitarist Matt Sweeney (who had previously worked with Chavez and Zwan, as well as playing banjo on Ease Down the Road) for the evocative January 2005 release Superwolf. Reflective, bittersweet, and achingly melodic, it was praised as one of the year’s first truly strong albums. Oldham and Sweeney followed up Superwolf that July with an extended single, I Gave You, featuring two non-album tracks. Sweeney was also on hand for the live album Summer in the Southeast, issued by Sea Note in November 2005. Oldham and Sweeney were joined by a full band for the shows. The singer released another solo album, The Letting Go, in September 2006 and followed it up with an EP of cover songs titled Ask Forgiveness in November 2007. Oldham was especially prolific in 2008, beginning the year with the live album Wilding in the West, an Australia-only release recorded in California during his 2007 tour. That spring, he returned with Lie Down in the Light, one of Oldham’s more polished efforts, which Oldham followed that fall with Is it the Sea?, another live album recorded on his 2006 UK tour and released by Domino. Just a few months later in spring 2009, Beware, an ambitious effort featuring contributions from Rob Mazurek, Azita Youseffi and the Mekons’ Jon Langford, arrived. - ©1992-2008 All Media Guide, LLC
Bachelorette
http://www.myspace.com/bachelorettepop
Annabel Alpers has put New Zealand on the tech-pop map. Recording as Bachelorette, her first album for the Drag City label is a pop treatise on technology’s perpetual intrusion on society. Titled “My Electric Family,” the record takes aim at an increasingly computer-reliant population. Her method is the catch. As a student of computer-based composition, Bachelorette makes use of traditional instruments, but deploys mostly electronic sounds. Like Kraftwerk’s “Computer World,” she uses the very devices she’s critiquing. The hazy doo-wop of “The National Grid” explores the urban existence; backing vocals inch the rhythm along, giving the feeling of walking on a crowded sidewalk. The brass section by the Royal New Zealand Air Force Brass Band on “Dream Sequence” plays like a sound-off for more physical activity. Disconsolate ballad “Where to Begin” poses the question, “Will this digital obsession ever end?” Again, Alpers’ lyrics articulately punctuate the situation: “You stay in your room/ On the computer/ Observing strangers/ Ignoring those around you.” “Her Rotating Head” is synth-pop on par with other outer-echelon divas like Annie (Norway) and Robyn (Sweden), but instead of a bubble gum theme, Alpers subliminally rails against objectification by likening the female side of a romance to a robotic doll. Using pop music as a vehicle for introspection, Bachelorette details the benefit and detriment of technological evolution, making one of the year’s best records in the process. CHECK THIS TRACK OUT: “Technology Boy,” the album’s centerpiece, veers out of the city and onto the scenic route, as processed harmonies flicker and float above warm, competing analog/digital tones. - Jake O’Connell, U.S. Associated Press
Brian Harnetty
http://www.brianharnetty.com/
Chicago’s Atavistic Records is well-known for its Unheard Music Series coordinated by John Corbett, as well as being the label of the Vandermark 5, the wild Out Trios series, and other bits of necessary forward-thinking musical ephemera from past and present. It is not, however, recognized for issuing field recordings of all-but-unknown American culture. Brian Harnetty, a Fellow of the Berea College Sound Archives in Kentucky, has assembled one of the most obsessive collections of field recordings from the Appalachian region from that very place, weaving them into what amounts to a 17-”movement” composition that is steeped in ghost trickery. This massive sound archive was the source, along with the help and permission of some of the original song, radio commercial, and dialogue collectors who contribute to both the library and this offering. Don’t look for Alan Lomax-type songs and stories here. That’s not at all what this is about; in fact, listening to this sounds like eavesdropping on an alien planet. What begins with an old woman trying to remember the old folk song “The Night Is Quite Advancing” becomes a brief radio commercial and then morphs into essentially the same song with different words in “I’ll Cross the Briny Ocean.” Along the way, Harnetty and his sonic co-conspirators add some double-tracking to twin the piano or a guitar phrase, spoken stories and allegories emerge only to dissolve into a duet of older women singing a folk song that is accompanied by someone from another of these field recordings playing a strange, jumpy, nearly ragtime song on an out-of-tune piano, and the story continues. On and on it goes for 48 minutes and change, never repeating, always moving, yet always standing stock-still. Songs and stories often intertwine, creating a much larger allegory from the ether — as in the case of “I’ll Have to Go Off and Be Gone Tonight,” where a toy piano and a pair of women singing about running away and eloping are juxtaposed against and then placed on top of an old man relating a story of a man who murdered his wife after a bad dream.
Brief interludes, like a yodeling radio duet of “Last Night as I Lay on the Prairie,” slip into more commercials and public service announcements and reportage of a conscription lottery, slipping in and out of a piano playing some primitive melody on its lower keys, interspersed by disembodied fragments of sung voices and bells, crowd sounds, and an announcement for a draft lottery introduction by the President that never comes. “That Drunkard’s Dream” and more toy pianos are punctuated by a single looped banjo, and by ten or 12 minutes in you are gone, off into some world you may be unfamiliar with except as the stuff of legend, and yet are drawn to compulsively. Field hollers, gospel songs, and American farmers prattling — it all becomes part of an aural tapestry that speaks louder than all the officially released Lomax documents for having been woven into a fabric rather than categorized and separated by date, time, place, person, and what is happening exactly. It just is. It was, but it is, here, now, yet forever out of time and place. Guaranteed to piss off most stuffy “folk music” purists, this is the ultimate folk music, as it borrows from sources it may know or may not but is not divulging except to present them as a living document. The gospel songs in “Soon We’ll Reach the Starry Sky” sound like they were recorded by two or three different original sources all spliced together with odd elements like a droning accordion key (or perhaps it’s a harmonium), bells, and more; finally, a man who sounds so old he could have been Methuselah is in dialogue with some broke store patrons, saying “We’ll look for ya if we come back…” with the great American huckster’s truth actually spoken as sincere surprise — in an exclamation of shock and bitter truth that brings the entire thing back to its beginning and raises the questions of who, what, where, how, and when all over again (but in vain, because this is secret history meant to be offered so as to create a greater secret by its revelation).
And seemingly, just as you are about to enter another rabbit hole of curiosity and entranced, rapt attention: silence. In it you can realize how that last line (which won’t be given away here) folds not only the recording, but all of that history, back in on itself all the way back to its lips, into the throat and belly trying to come back out until it disappears into its own mouth, hidden, obfuscated, but ever present resonating in the empty spaces and open-air echoing in the space of moments, decades, centuries. This is a new kind of transmission, one that begs far more questions that it could — or even want to — answer, keeping these names and faces eternal yet as anonymous as the land they were swallowed into by the grave. Brilliant, maddening, addictive: this is the kind of stuff Nurse with Wound’s Stephen Stapleton lived for back when he was creating his big obscure music list — and he should add this — and other sound hunters would give anything to have created. That it was sanctioned by the Berea College Sound Archives is even more remarkable. Harnetty has proved that one way to preserve history is to weave it into the moment and let it vanish in our midst while echoing forever its truths, aphorisms, superstitions, and lies. - ©1992-2009 All Media Guide, LLC