Summer in the Southeast is ostensibly Will Oldham's first live album, but it feels strangely familiar. Perhaps it's because his best albums are as intimate and affecting as a cloistered club gig. Or perhaps it's because this album comes only one year after I Am a Cold Rock, a vapid tribute album, and Greatest Palace Hits, a compilation with embellished renditions of some of his best-known songs. The latter was contrived and caustic, employing stately session musicians in the service of mechanized self-parody. Unlike Palace Hits' cryptic assortment of sterile performances, Southeast summons all the power and potency of a competent backing band without suffering any homogenization. Brash and unhinged, Oldham is able to evade the polished sheen that diffused his earlier effort; for a musician whose erratic solo shows often fail to evoke the vitality of his records, this is a delightfully drunken racket of tangled guitars and thunderous percussion.
The album captures an anger and regret intense enough to nearly bruise listeners and attendees, but also manages to preserve the pristine trembles in Oldham's throat. Imagine the forceful clarity of Superwolf applied to Palace's entire catalog: vaporous guitars elevating frail backwoods ditties into tornadic Texan epics. "Blokbuster" and "Break of Day" are vastly more impressive than their studio counterparts, paying tribute to Kranky ambiance and Neil Young's lassoed solos. The band-- which here includes Matt Sweeney and David Bird on guitar, Paul Oldham on bass, and Pink Nasty (author of the inestimable "What the Fuck") on back-up vocals-- often veers toward some fascinating experiments in prog mysticism ("A Sucker's Evening", "O Let It Be") and convulsive psych ("Madeleine Mary"). The vaudeville ragtime of "I Send My Love to You" cops as much from the Mekons as Mr. Kite, while those in search of vintage Bonnie gloom will find solace in the glazed keyboards and crumbling voices of "Wolf Among Wolves" and "Nomadic Revery".
Oldham's willingness to navigate his band through odd tones and genres can also end in noxious mediocrity, though: "May It Always Be", one of Ease Down the Road's best songs, gravitates around flaccid punk riffs at an absurd volume. And at its worst, the album approximates-- however bizarrely-- Yield-era Pearl Jam. Fortunately, most of the album's other blemishes are veiled blessings: What could be more ingratiating than a Bonnie "Prince" Billy album with poor fidelity, giggling herbs, trampled Rolling Rock bottles, and reams of static? Where else can you hear the abashed elation of an entire club singing "Death to Everyone", or Oldham mumbling that he "got clown in his face," or an asshole, surrounded by cackling girls, advising the band to "play hard" as Oldham wanders into the tender sorrow of "I See a Darkness"? Summer in the Southeast is far from perfect as an aesthetic statement-- or even as a recording-- but as a document of Oldham's irresistible occultism, it could hardly be more effective.
