When Will Oldham first recorded the song "(I Was Drunk at the Pulpit)" more than 20 years ago, he was going by the name Palace Brothers. The song, from his 1993 album There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You, was a meditation on faith and fallibility. With its dense imagery and antiquated language, it gave the impression of an actor treading the footboards, performing the role of an old-time singer, staging a spiritual reckoning.
Around the same time, Oldham recorded a very different version of "Pulpit" for a Peel Session, and it shows just how malleable his songs are. This performance, which opens his new odds-and-ends comp Pond Scum, is slow and deliberate. An acoustic and an electric guitar noodle solemnly. And Oldham’s voice is deeper and less distant; he pushes it up to the front of the song to let the listener relish the richness and texture that age has bestowed on him. Oldham isn’t an actor anymore, but a sinner experiencing a spiritual crisis in real time.
"(I Was Drunk at the) Pulpit" is a potent opener to Pond Scum, which collects a few old Peel Sessions into a surprisingly affecting meditation on the nature of faith. As these two versions of the song prove, it’s not a redundancy, but a compilation that emphasizes new ideas and overlooked themes in Oldham’s prodigious catalog. Oldham favors retrospectives that tweak the very idea of retrospectives: Greatest Palace Music, from 2004, featured his Bonnie "Prince" Billy alias covering songs by his Palace persona, and he followed it up eight years later with an EP of self-covers called Now Here’s My Plan. Even as they condense and summarize his catalog, these releases are his most esoteric, rewarding, and engaging in the context of his career, when a listener can grasp the various allusions Oldham is making to himself.
Pond Scum falls squarely into that category, and may therefore be a fans-only album. And yet, taken on its own terms, Pond Scum is also a good-faith effort to plumb the nature of God. Not just any deity, but the distinctively American one born in 1741 in Jonathan Edwards’ hellfire sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and since then praised and perpetuated in countless old-time folk and gospel songs.
Despite its innate humanism ("The world is within you, without is of mud"), "(I Was Drunk at the) Pulpit" is the only real brimstone moment on Pond Scum. Other songs are much more generous, some even celebratory: "Death to Everyone" testifies that our days are sweeter for being numbered, and Oldham’s band sound like they’re not wasting a single moment. "When Thy Song Flows Through Me" is lovely in its simplicity, a thank-you note to a higher power that has blessed Oldham with the ability to make music.
Perhaps the big draw here is Oldham’s cover of "The Cross," the most spiritually explicit song by Prince. As it appears toward the end of his 1988 double album Sign 'O' the Times, the song sounds like a slightly perverse altar call, teetering between the sacred and the secular. "We all have our problems, some big, some are small," he sings. "Soon all of our problems will be taken by the Cross." But Oldham undersells the sentiment, hinting that what sounds like a consoling promise might actually be a threat of end times reckoning.
As many people do when talking about God, Oldham occasionally lets language get away from him, and the project, with its strengths and weaknesses, illustrates an interesting tendency in Oldham’s songwriting. He’s not especially well known for writing about spirituality, but that may be due to the fact that he often presents God in negative terms: Oldham sees a darkness and describes it in detail, which implies a light that he either cannot or will not see.
Correction (1/25/16 4:06 p.m.): This review previously incorrectly attributed the lyrics of "Jolly Five (64)" and "Jolly One (2/15)" to Will Oldham. They were originally written by Rabindranath Tagore in his collection of poems, Gitanjali*.*
