Drag City
2009
Beware
About This Album
It's only an artist supremely confident in his art who can begin an album with the string-band hoedown that is "Beware Your Only Friend" (complete with rustic handclaps and a mixed vocal chorus). But Bonnie "Prince" Billy is certainly an artist comfortable in any surrounding, from the Baroque isolationism of The Letting Go and the laid-back charm of Lie Down in the Light to the smooth countrypolitanism of Sings Greatest Palace Music. Musically, Beware has a bit of everything; although nothing is as spare and haunted as The Letting Go, Billy moves from modern string band to smooth strings-and-slide to ragged alt country without batting an eyelash -- and that's just the first three songs. Oldham also has no fear in his lyricism, which intersperses clear, direct thoughts about relationships with metaphors or language that cloud the issues just as the sun was beginning to shine (that's just his neo-primitivist take on "the old, weird America"). Simply contrast his divulging lyrics on "You Don't Love Me" ("You say you like my eyes only, or just the way I giggle/Sometimes you like the smell of me or how my stomach jiggles") to the fatalist cipher that appears in "Death Final": "In a pit of bodies, I am loved by all/ By hamhock and by handkerchief, by damsel and by dall.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 and 9)

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