*** Will Oldham

JOYA

(Drag City)

Former Palace Brother Will Oldham -- the artist formerly not particularly well known as Push -- seems to have found himself, or at least lost the desire to cloak his rootsy exploits in various permutations of the Palace moniker. He's also made a full recovery from the rickety acoustic regression of last year's Arise Therefore (a Palace release on Drag City), instead picking up where '95's organ-, piano-, and electric guitar-fortified Viva Last Blues (a Palace Music release on Drag City) left off. Plugging back in, he leads a loose yet sure-footed ensemble through a dozen folk-based numbers that bring to mind the young Dylan and early Neil Young without sounding quite like either.

It's Oldham's penchant for cryptic turns of verse rooted in a kind of apocalyptic spirituality ("I've seen people crumble and fall by the way/And humble themselves like it's their due to pay") and Appalachian-flavored folk that most resembles Dylan. And it's his high-pitched nasal whine and world-weary delivery that recalls Harvest-era Young. The fuller arrangements on Joya, particularly on strum-and-drone tunes like "Antagonism" (a crocodile smile of a song featuring string embellishments) and the ominous, Eastern-tinged "New Gypsy," also hint at some of R.E.M.'s less accessible folk abstractions, which means Oldham's still an acquired taste, though not quite as hard to acquire as he once was.

-- Matt Ashare