Bonnie "Prince" Billy - The Letting Go
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CD Details
Artist: Bonnie "Prince" BillyEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2006-09-19
Music Label: Drag City
Soundtracks:
- Love Comes to Me
- Strange Form of Life
- Wai
- Cursed Sleep
- No Bad News
- Cold & Wet
- Big Friday
- Lay and Love
- Seedling
- Then the Letting Go
- God's Small Song
- I Called You Back
Music reviews of The Letting Go
Music Review: The Love Bard
Rating: 5 Stars
More layered and involved than "Master and Everyone" (my only other Bonnie 'Prince' Billy), "The Letting Go" is a beautiful and sometimes haunting work, masterfully blending folk, pop, country, and blues. Lyrically, he's gone off the deep end (not a complaint!) since "Master": I love the way he sees dead people flying in the sky in the opening lines of "Love Comes to Me"--or maybe he just senses the souls of the dead on the wings of birds. Throughout the album his lyrics tend toward surrealistic and stream-of-consciousness imagery. It took me a couple of listens before I figured out that "The Seedling" (should have been clue!) is primarily about a sex act--so obscure is method of addressing it. Oh--and the music's first-rate, too. For me, "Cursed Love" and "Lay and Love" are the finest tracks, the former opening with a gorgeous melange of guitar and strings, the latter making use of an intriguing synthesized drum sound. What a wise choice bringing in the sublime Dawn McCarthy for accompanying vocals! "The Letting Go" wouldn't have been nearly as emotive without her considerable talent. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy himself plays the part of the definitive love bard, exhibiting sheer genius in describing the topsy-turvey experience of being in love. One is forced to assume that between "Master" and "The Letting Go" he'd switched lovers. I mean, he's completely whipped in these grooves; though, for the most part, he manages to avoid conveying it in a treacly, disgusting manner. (Well, "I Called You Back" does border on the insipid--and it's the only somewhat wearying song here.) There's a final 'hidden' track (very hidden), a loose, meandering affair that nevertheless wraps up the album quite nicely.
Description of The Letting Go
Limited Edition two CD set by Bonnie Prince Billy (AKA Will Oldham) featuring the 2006 album The Letting Go plus a bonus disc, Little Lost Songs, which features an additional 13 unreleased or rare tracks! The Letting Go is an overwhelming undertaking. There are strings-lovely charts that do so much more than just trace chord changes up and down the neck. Arrangements by Ryder McNair and Nico Muhly are threaded throughout the record, augmenting a simple quintet of players to provide a sixth sense. The deceptive nature of his band is on display from the top. 'Filthy' Jim White is known far and wide for his resource behind the drum kit and he proves it song after song, with sensitivity that provokes dynamic variety from skins, an acoustic depth to the room. Paul Oldham's bass is a feeling accompaniment to Bonny's guitar, played with brotherly clairvoyance and constancy. Young Emmett Kelly's clean electric guitar lines roam within the web and suddenly shine, are blues and folk and R&B in shifting turn, guilelessly tactic and soulfully expressive. And up front with Bonny is the bewitching Dawn McCarthy of Faun Fables. Her vocal flights on those records can hardly prepare one for the intimacy and empathy of her harmonies and other voices on The Letting Go. Domino.Having long recorded as Palace Music or Palace, the enigmatic, elusive Bonnie "Prince" Billy continues to confound musical expectations. His latest may well be his loveliest, a series of meditations and tone poems on love and mortality, with the autumnal strains of a chamber quartet and the vocal counterpoint of Dawn McCarthy supporting Billy's tremulous expression of his surreal, stream-of-consciousness lyricism. Results range from the dreamy, bluesy "Cursed Sleep" and the evocation of a British madrigal on "No Bad News" to the discordant propulsion of "The Seedling" and the call and response of the folkish "Then the Letting Go." It all fits together in a manner that defies categorization and dares the listener to resist its aural seduction. --Don McLeese
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