May 23 - 30, 1 9 9 6

Glass Palace

Will Oldham makes more curious, fragmented folk

by Richard C. Walls

Arise Therefore is the fourth album by Palace Brothers, sometimes known as Palace Brothers, often just Palace. By whatever name it's essentially composer/guitarist/singer Will Oldham, a vehicle for his not wholly inauthentic take on folk music, with structures designed to sustain circular storytelling and ground warbling laments. And Oldham warbles, literally, quite a bit, though usually landing on pitch. His voice is a curious thing and practically the whole show (unless you buy into his poetics); it's fey, in the dictionary sense, a high-pitched combination of ennui and fecklessness, life-sick certainly but forceful in the immutable way it fails to connect with the vaguely menacing, sometimes bluntly brutal lyrics. A combination, then, of Emo Phillips and M. Gira. Which may sound like torture and no doubt is for many.

For Arise Therefore (on Drag City), Will is joined by his brother Ned on bass and guitar, Gastr del Sol's David Grubbs on piano and organ, and a Maya Tone drum machine supplying an oblivious tempo. This last item, one suspects, is meant to be a great joke of the disenchanted kind, a conceptual coup whose dull kick lies in the confluence of its oddity and its aptness. For me, the scale tips toward the latter -- the machine, though occasionally out of synch, duly emphasizes the lugubriousness of the slow numbers (and that is torture) while supplying a sonic corollary to the hollow-spiritedness of the mid-tempo ones. At one point, on "No Gold Digger," it even supplies an important clue to the song's possible meaning -- the tacky Latin insinuations of the rhythm tell us that we must be in Tijuana or some such famously evil place.

Oh but those lyrics. Oldham has chosen to give us half-sentences, unspecified pronouns, and blended images. I, on the other hand, am limited to reasonably coherent sentences. So any explication of his lyrics on my part will most likely involve invention or reduction (or both), which adds up to false representation . . . as near as I can figure.

Anyway, Oldham is both talented and bogus, smug and joky and sincere; his relationship to his lyrics (and we have only his creepy heartache timbre to guide us) is nicely ambiguous and asks for large indulgences on our part. The quaint phrasings of "A Sucker's Evening," the stately surrealism of "A Group of Women," and the poker-faced misogyny of "Disorder" don't add up to much more than one clever boy's jottings. But when sung with Oldham's implacable listlessness, accompanied by musicians of dubious intent (pianist Grubbs, especially, is a loose cannon), and backed by a drum machine, the effect is of someone both shoring up and trashing his most ephemeral insights. Oldham wants to come across as both serious and not caring; he wants implausible deniability, and who can blame him? Otherwise we'd have to take him as he comes. And that would be much less satisfying, all around. o

Palace Music play upstairs at the Middle East Sunday, May 26.