Will Oldham's Guarapero/Lost Blues 2 is more a precious pile of scraps than it is a great album. The collection of singles includes live and recorded work garnered from b-sides and compilation tracks, as well as unreleased material. In other words, this is not Oldham's Sgt. Pepper. In fact, it's more akin to "The Collected Letters of Emily Dickinson;" fragments, which are valuable primarily in their relation to other work. Together, these pieces grant a bit more access into the open wound of Oldham's dark but sober poetic vision.
Lost Blues 2 recalls Roland Barthes' account of sorting through piles of family photographs in his seminal text, "Camera Lucida." His search for a photograph that marked the essence of photography became conflated with a search for his dead mother, as he discovered "that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead." Barthes did find the photograph that invoked both his dead mother's presence and the defining essence of photography. He refers to this image as "the wintergarden photograph."
The remnants of Lost Blues to sort through are diverse in quality and style as they span the course of seven years. "The Risen Lord," a D.H. Lawrence poem sung over a weak drum machine beat and synthy organs doesn't produce the creepy tension you'd expect Oldham to pull off in such an unlikely juxtaposition. Live recordings of "For the Mekons et al," and "Stable Will" are uneven recordings, but show off some of Oldham's least restrained singing. "Gesundheit" starts off relaying, "I dreamed I saw Phil Ochs last night/ Alive as you or me," before heading into a tape collage that ranges between a religious children's tape and a soundscape reminiscent of Angelo Badalamenti's "Twin Peaks" soundtrack.
Lost Blues 2 isn't greater than the sum of its parts. It inspired thoughts of Emily Dickinson and French photographic wounds-- how rock is that? Those uninitiated into the Oldham/ Palace canon would be better off picking up a copy of the Palace Brothers' Viva Last Blues or Bonnie "Prince" Billy's I See a Darkness. If you get dragged in deeper, spend your money on Joya, Oldham's high-strung and sublime ode to terror. But for others of you-- and you know who you are-- Lost Blues 2 is an irresistible bundle of odd and ends which has the potential to contain that note or phrase which unsettles. Or rather, it's just another record in which you might find your wintergarden photograph.
