Bonnie prince billy

A new Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album often prompts me to visit a remarkable resource called The Royal Stable, a website dedicated to thoroughly cataloguing and cross-referencing this most fiendishly complicated of musical careers.

'Wolfroy Goes To Town' will be Will Oldham's ninth album as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

As a couple of you who’d seen earlier shows suggested yesterday, Will Oldham was on great form for the Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy & The Cairo Gang show in London last night. Not sure if anyone else who was there can corroborate, but did he wet himself during the encores?

Rock’s most eccentric romantic rides on...

Around the release of his last studio album, "Beware", Will Oldham embarked on a small project. According to the writer Kelefa Sanneh, in a New Yorker profile published in January 2009, Oldham intended, “To promote the album with singles, a photo shoot, and a handful of interviews, if only to prove that record promotion doesn’t really work, at least not for him.”

…now it’s Bonnie ‘Prince’ Belly

Of course the practicalities of listening to music in the Uncut office shouldn’t concern you much, but it’s worth noting that for some weeks, possibly months now, we’ve been grappling with the new Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album, “Beware”, widely proclaimed as one of his best ever and yet, round these parts at least, treacherously hard to hear properly.

A couple or so months ago, I was grappling with Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “Lie Down In The Light”, and wrote about Will Oldham’s increasing penchant for setting his voice up against more conventionally mellifluous female foils. That point seems worth making even more today, with the arrival of a new live album by the great man, “Is It The Sea”.

“NEW HARMONY ON AN AWESOME SCALE,” announces Will Oldham on “Missing One”. Somewhere in the shadows, there’s a singer called Ashley Webber playing a discreet Emmylou to his Gram, the latest harmonious foil chosen to track his tremulous voice. Oldham’s voice is much less wayward than it was on the Palace and early Bonnie “Prince” Billy records, of course, but it’s strange how he’s recently found it useful to match his voice against another: on “The Letting Go”, Dawn McCarthy from Faun Fables; on last year’s overlooked covers set, “Ask Forgiveness”, Meg Baird from Espers.

I guess it’s still fairly early in the morning, but I’m struggling right now to think of many players around at the moment who are as slippery and compelling as Will Oldham. He’s had, by his standards, a relatively quiet year. But the other day, a new mini-album turned up unexpectedly, a few days after it had actually arrived in the shops. Like a big American urban star or Radiohead, clearly Oldham has abandoned the niceties of advance releases for hacks. Which is fair enough, if a bit frustrating.