In recent years, the nonsensical notion of the non-sequential album follow-up has gained a thoughtless acceptance seldom found outside totalitarianism. Most memorably, Beck's crystalline Mutations was relegated to busywork status while the distinction of follow-up to Odelay was reserved for the vastly inferior Midnite Vultures. Record industry muckety-mucks had miraculously succeeded where scientists had failed: in splitting the Beck, yielding one salaciously marketable flavor-hijacker, one dour, lovelorn folkie, and one 10-kiloton explosion of inconceivable destructive power (though the latter has yet to see the inside of a Sam Goody).
But if the music industry is not bound by the ordinary laws of time and logic, then certainly neither is Pitchfork. And thus, I can state without fear of contradiction or absurdity that I have been waiting for the track that follows "Raining in Darling"-- the final tune on Bonnie "Prince" Billy's I See a Darkness-- since 1999.
Now, even by a conservative estimate, I can count some fifty Will Oldham tracks between the conclusion of I See a Darkness and the release of Master and Everyone, without even including his collaborations with the Boxhead Ensemble, Rian Murphy, Johnny Cash or Dave Pajo. But nothing on the rare gems compilation Guarapero: Lost Blues 2; nor his experimental collaboration with Mick Turner and a book of old Rabindranath Tagore poems, Get on Jolly; nor the minimalist Ode Music soundtrack; nor his amped-up covers EP, More Revery; nor the disturbingly smooth adult-contempo album, Ease Down the Road have even come close to the sonorous danse macabre of I See a Darkness. Oldham's relentless prolificity aside, the skullfaced Darkness still awaits its true successor.
Master and Everyone is probably not it. Not that Master and Everyone isn't a fine record-- it is. But like much of Oldham's recent output, it never achieves the black solemnity of I See a Darkness, or even the ramshackle eroticism of Viva Last Blues-- arguably, Oldham's best works. It's sparse without being immediate, ruminative without being particularly profound, and somewhat sadly, confessional without sounding at all redemptive. In a world where chronology serves marketing and music criticism, Master and Everyone is Oldham's follow-up to Arise, Therefore.
Master and Everyone has a stark whiteness about it: bare branches and gathering dark. "Winter comes and snow/ I can't marry you, you know," opens the first track, "The Way"; even the gently swelling strings under the chorus, "Love me the way I love you," hardly warm the song at all. Though seemingly intimate, Oldham still sounds like he's singing in a cavern. The song is so bleakly quiet you can hear the icicles dripping.
The deadening duet, "Ain't You Wealthy, Ain't You Wise?", is even more withdrawn; the refrain, "There's no pain to lament/ And no dream undreamt," seems to mock optimism as cruelly as the presence of female accompanist Marty Slayton mocks companionship. The sparse title track lies little more than a plaintive guitar strum beneath what amounts to a post-breakup resolution: "I am now free/ A master and everyone/ Servant of all and servant to none." Oddly enough, this struck me as something straight out of Martin Luther; his 1520 tract, The Freedom of Christian, reads: "A Christian is a perfectly free master of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all." Weird.
This would be (and may indeed be) a stretch were the album not utterly suffused with a deeply confessional Christianity. To be sure, the language and imagery of religion has always been an integral part of Oldham's songwriting, but always rather ambivalently-- as repressive and hypocritical, as well as authentic and redemptive. The boy in the Palace Brothers' stunning early tune, "Riding", summed it up best when he retorted, "God is what I make of him." On Master and Everyone, however, Oldham seems to flirt with downright evangelism. In "Maundering", Oldham proclaims that he is "going to find something true," singing, "Evil is as evil do/ God is always showing this to you/ I'm going to glorify everything good/ And put right what is wrong as I should." Later, over the ringing acoustic pluck of "Lessons from What's Poor", Oldham lapses almost into psalm:
And if I hunger see that I doBring me water; bring me foodFill me up with things that are trueAnd very good...I take my lessons from what's poorThat's what God has put me forWealth is death; of that I'm sure**Farewell.
But this rather grating homiletics seems to come and go (with the presence of the chirpy and no less grating Slayton).
The supremely stripped down "Even If Love" recalls the post-Slint, Pajo-inflected angularity of Joya, opening with the wonderful lyric, "Once again in the world of 1200 feelings/ All in electric lights/ We see what we can," amidst a low, snaky guitar line. Above all, the fiercely elegant "Wolf Among Wolves" remains Master and Everyone's incomparable highlight, fusing skeletal acoustics with deep and subtle electronic noise underfoot, and punctuated with sharp falsetto howls. "Why can't I be loved as what I am?" Oldham sings, "A wolf among wolves/ And not as a man among men." "Wolves" is really the only track on Master and Everyone that eschews two-dimensional desolation or ham-fisted sanctification to accomplish something truly and believably introspective.
Time passes, but it's a fiction to clock the years by great albums. Master and Everyone is a solid collection of rather thin songs that never quite sound intimate; songs that meant something profound to someone-- but always, it seems, someone else. It is not a great album by any means, but it is a timely one. Unnaturally cold, and weak like January sun. Perhaps we can do what we want with chronology, but the seasons run of their own accord. And right now, like the rest of America, it is winter in Louisville.
