The saying goes that you should never judge a book by it’s cover, and the same goes for records. The striking silhouette of Will Oldham’s wispy balding head adorns the front of Beware, and combines with the scrawled text to serve as a visual homage to Neil Young’s “Tonight's the Night”. It suggests a move away from the brightness of last year’s Lie Down In The Light, perhaps a return to the dark brooding of Days in The Wake or even I See A Darkness. The truth is, nothing could be further from the case.When it comes to making pure country records, Oldham’s got form, recreating his back catalogue on 2004’s Bonnie Prince Billy Sings Greatest Palace Music. Since that record, Oldham has recorded a series of collaborative records, with the likes of Dawn McCarthy, Tortoise and Matt Sweeney as Super Wolf, a series of out-takes and live records and two studio albums that while appreciated were not hailed with the adulation that frequently comes with his releases. The whisper’s are that Beware is ‘The Big One’, the point where, having paved the way and acted, willingly or not, as a figure head for the genre, Oldham will finally gain wider recognition. In order to do this, the trademark stripped down, brooding has gone, to be replaced with an everything including the kitchen sink production; choirs, sax, fluttering flutes, xylophone, mariachi band, the works, smeared liberally all over the record.Opener “Beware Your Only Friend” sets up the stereotype image of Oldham, the slightly creepy, sexual figure in the corner, crooning “I want to be your only friend” before the female choir join in with the question “Is that SCAAAAARRRRYYYYYYYY?”. Well, sort of. But not quite. Later in the song he invites the lady in question to “come sit on my knee”. There’s more wordplay elsewhere on ‘You Can’t Hurt Me Now”, where he croons “the more I feel myself, the more alone I am”. Quite. Where once this would have seemed more sinister and brooding, set alongside a mariachi band and a xylophone solo it seems to lack bite. Like the afore mentioned Tonight’s the Night, there is a distinct bar-room feel to the record. One can well imagine it coming out of a jukebox late on a sweaty summers evening somewhere in the mid-west, the swooning fiddles and pedal steel floating off into the hazy evening.There are occasional flourishes of the old Oldham in the likes of “My Life’s Work”, which starts promisingly before the OTT production comes in and adds a plastic soul saxophone solo that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Bowie or Roxy Music record. To find it on a Bonnie Prince Billy record, however, is a bit like finding a penguin in the Bahamas. It is only when he is able to hold back that Beware truly succeeds, the lilting refrain of “I Won’t Ask Again” being a case in point. Album closer “Afraid Ain’t Me” also manages to lift itself for the most part, stepping away from Country and Western for a moment and corralling the shuffling beats and layers of instrumentation to drive the song forwards, rather than allowing them to dominate it. Ultimately however, the prevailing forces at work on Beware gain the upper hand with a change into the major key half way through and a twittering flute solo bring things to a disappointing end.As country music goes, Beware isn’t a bad record, but it comes as somewhat of a disappointment to see Will Oldham, who for so long has stood as someone prepared to challenge the norms of the genre to get sucked in to some of its worst excesses. 62%Bonnie Prince Billy on MySpace