Palace – Reissues: There is No One What Will Take Care Of You, Palace Brothers a.k.a. Days In The Wake, Hope, Lost Blues And Other Songs, Viva Last Blues

How entrenched can one man be in the last two decades of alternative culture? From snapping the iconic cover of Slint’s seminal Spiderland album, perhaps one of the images most strongly associated with the modern American underground, to his lead role in the critically lauded film Old Joy and an appearance in R Kelly’s magically insane Trapped In The Closet Will Oldham would be something of a cult figure even if he hadn’t written and recorded upwards of a dozen albums (not counting his major collaborations with artists as noteworthy as Tortoise) of the most highly acclaimed Americana of modern times.

Under various monikers, mostly varying versions of the Palace and Bonnie ‘Price’ Billy names, he’s moved, over the years, from the simplest Appalachian backwoods strumming to the borderline sex-comedy hoedowns of his recent live work via Steve Albini savagery (more on which later) and straight-out classic songwriting – I See A Darkness will probably remain in “Best Album Of All Time” lists for many years to come.

With this set of reissues we get to start from the start and understand a little more of how Oldham’s curious career evolved. There Is No One What Will Take Care Of You is a stunner of simplicity. Presenting a worldview, as he continues to do, so bleak as to evoke laughter, with yearning, desperate songs like ‘Long Before’ and ‘The Cellar Song’, the whole record gives you the basics in Oldham 101: the religious imagery (particularly on ‘Idle Hands Are The Devil’s Plaything’), the pastoral lyrics and use of outdated language, the sudden shock of bad language or a horribly out of place electric guitar. Of course the fragile, shattered voice and the tiny, battered songs are the main thing here – the sound of a Steinbeck funeral that Oldham would continue to play out for many years. The influence of this album in particular is hard to overestimate.

He continued the name Palace Brothers into Days In The Wake, but where the brothers were exactly is anyone’s guess. This is a solitary, often solo, lo-fi Oldham declaiming “I have warned you, there are awful things” , an unconscionably broken man, voice wavering in the night. It’s the Oldham most people conjure when they think of him – an Oldham that returned to even greater effect on I See A Darkness. There aren’t any bad songs here – it’s as simple as that – but there are some tracks that are perhaps nearer to stripped perfection than others – ‘Pushkin’ with its hamfisted playing and seemingly endless “God is the answer” refrain; ‘I Send My Love To You’’s nursery rhyme bittersweetness; the field recording greatness of ‘No More Workhouse Blues’ and the somehow grandiose, inspiring cries of ‘I Am A Cinematographer’.

In 1994, now using the Songs suffix, with production faith placed in Sean O Hagan, we received Hope, an EP that opened with ‘Agnes, Queen Of Sorrow’. Of course this has remained at the top of the pile in terms of fans’ favourite Palace tunes for nearly twenty years so it’s no surprise that what follows, while excellent, can’t hope to match the opening moments. What’s key to note here is the crisp, high production and a much more clear-eyed approach to songwriting – often with great shots of humour running through it. ‘Untitled’ for instance, is a great and funny song (“I have made a cake like that in my own home once or twice/Just as fine as that one which we had some of today/None of it was wonderful, much morely OK”: a countrified Dr Seuss). The Cohen cover ‘Winter Lady’ is heartwrenching, BPB drawing more fragility and self-awareness from the material than even the original mustered; wonderfully the guitars still buzz with chords not quite reached fully and in time. ‘Christmastime In The Mountains’ opens with the achingly sad “Should I play ball with the dogs, or should I walk away?” and relies on sparse piano and hushed guitar to support Billy’s tale of relationship disintegration. ‘All Gone, All Gone’ and ‘Werner’s Last Blues To Blokbuster’ could not be more different, the former a thematic partner to ‘Agnes…’ the latter a Beatles-driven production-fest that somehow maintains the inherent dignity and integrity of the half-smiling song.

A swerve in direction came sharp in 1995 with the Albini-powered Viva Last Blues, a full-band Western frontiersman jam that most accurately indicated where Oldham’s sound would eventually settle. Backed by Plush’s Liam Hayes and Sebadoh’s Jason Lowenstein, Prince actually began to sing out, fully and whole-heartedly here, his confidence possibly buffered by the array of sounds filling the space around him. His performance on ‘Viva Ultra’ is genuinely powerful, Albini’s recording style strangely suited to bringing out the full-blooded nature of the songs. Although we have Will’s mountain-fucking fun on ‘The Mountain Low’ and the gentle embrace of the wonderful ‘New Partner’ this record, despite its luminous cast and often touching songmaking feels like a minor misstep. Ultimately Oldham’s move towards this full band direction would paradoxically reduce the power of his voice and writing as time went on –the more accessible and easier to digest his records are, the less they hold in terms of emotional reward.

’97 delivered the compilation of singles, b-sides and previously unreleased material, Lost Blues And Other Songs. It mopped up the stragglers nicely including the anthemic, choral ‘Ohio River Boat Song’, the tremendously upsetting ‘Valentine’s Day’ and what may be the definitive song of the Palace era, his cover of Sally Timms’ ‘Horses’, replete with Dave Pajo’s madly incongruous near-metal guitar solo. Some of Palace’s most defeated, downbeat material is to be found here in the shape of the near-unlistenable ‘Stable Will’ and the staggering, slow lament of ‘West Palm Beach’ but we also get the invigorating rocking crunch of a live take of ‘Untitled’ and the unreconstructed country punk of ‘Riding’. Of course, Bonnie would explore each of these areas in more depth, often for whole albums at a time, in years to come.

The rest of Will Oldham’s career is, of course, more well-known, more celebrated than the Palace era, but if one wishes to understand where the Master of Master and Everyone grew from, where the Darkness of I See A Darkness began and, of course, if you wanna hear what the guy who took photos of Slint sounded like when he put his own band together then, well, you’d best get involved, and prepare for some wild, tuned-up heartache.