Will Oldham has already released several singles and EPs this year with different collaborators and all in different styles. Like Bill Callahan-- another artist who came out of Drag City's mid-1990s bumper crop-- Oldham makes music that implies intimacy while evoking so many personalities that an overview of his work is more like a cubist painting than a candid photograph.
He's worked at this pace for nearly 20 years now, and what's amazing isn't that he's managed to maintain consistency, but that he's made inconsistency part of his artistic identity. In the past two years, he's worked with David Byrne on film scores and remixed Hot Chip. He starred in a short film that made it to Sundance (Pioneer) and made a brief appearance in Jackass 3D alongside a gorilla. Even when his records arguably don't turn out well-- like the Tortoise-assisted covers album The Bold and the Brave or Greatest Palace Music, where he gave high-gloss treatments to his earliest, most rustic material-- the point is that Oldham threw out his ego and recorded them anyway.
But an artist's generosity can be a fan's chore, and a lot of Oldham's releases end up being markers of time more than anything else. Of his recent offerings, "There Is No God" b/w "God Is Love", released as a benefit for two Gulf-oriented charities, Save Our Gulf and the Turtle Hospital, is most in line with what Oldham has done well in the past few years: Joyful, barefoot Americana at some unfixed intersection between folk and rock. Oldham's last two solo full-lengths (2009's Beware and 2008's Lie Down in the Light) are clever and diverse, working with sounds so familiar that the music's idiosyncrasies-- a bizarre key change, a clarinet or flute solo, a few extra bars of a verse where a more traditional song would've moved to the chorus-- melt into the overall impression of the music. It's an approach that Oldham has probably absorbed from country, a genre with enough clearly delineated rules that the fun part becomes how to bend or break them without becoming something unrecognizable: The innovation is in the craft, not the concept.
"Must Be Blind" and "Live in Muscle" are two songs Oldham wrote with Matt Sweeney, the former Chavez singer he last collaborated with on 2005's Superwolf album. Musically, they're more stoic and musky than "There Is No God"-- an influence of Sweeney's that brings out the fist-on-chest Appalachian Oldham explored on 1999's I See a Darkness, still probably his best-known album. There are Will Oldhams for every occasion; this is the Oldham to bring out when riding alone in the frozen fields before dawn or burying your first-born in the rocky plot behind the outhouse. Personally, I prefer the shroom-eating, big-grinned porchsitter he's become in the past few years, but his sobriety is tense and convincing, and probably the mood people associate him with the most.
The Mindeater is the most atypical thing he's released this year in part because he gave up musical control to the Phantom Famliy Halo, a psych band formerly based in Louisville, Kentucky, where Oldham is from and has lived for most of his life. Three of the four songs are woozy and minimally arranged; one-- a cover of the Everly Brothers' "I Wonder If I Care as Much" featuring Slint's Todd Brashear-- becomes a an archetypal hard-rock jam dominated by Dominic Cipolla's electric guitar about two minutes into it. The recording of Oldham's voice sounds thin and grainy by design, which is a shame because of how full and expressive it's become over the past five or so years. In general, it's not a bad release, just one that doesn't play to his strengths-- or, at least not strengths he's developed so far. Still, when I started following Oldham's music after buying Palace's Lost Blues and Other Songs around 1997, I wouldn't have expected him to become as polished and celebratory as he is now-- some evidence that if there are roles he doesn't convincingly fill, it might just be a matter of time and a few more loose collaborations before he figures them out.
