Customer Reviews

Arise Therefore

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

There is little in Palace's catalog to prepare you for this stunning document of rage, regret and longing. "Viva Last Blues" sounds like a party record next to this! The minimalist drum machines set the backdrop for Will's most complex and beautiful words yet. There is little else-- a wheeze of organ, a spare guitar figure, gloomy bass-- and that's the point. There is nothing to distract attention from Will's otherworldly singing and truly chilling and beautiful lyrics

Beautiful in the pure, heartbreaking way that suits true beauty best. Soft, shocking, then unbelievably hopeful, this is an album that should be listened to completely, in the dark, smoking, with someone who understands you.

Stablemate trundles to the grounding beat that gives a feel of being hardened yet fragile yet always highlighted by the repetitive piano refrains. Here is the start of a wonderfully steady L.P. of true Oldham intensity. The truth of the matter is that OLdham comes through with winning colours when he is at his bleakest and most minimal. The greatest example of this is the caustic and vaguely mystical atmosphere of A Sucker's Evening. This song is disarmingly powerful in it's simplicity, it has to be at most 4 notes repeated over with a brief step upwards and then retreat. It's the title track which suddenly turns the listener around with a sense of simple yet slightly caroulsing joy. As a whole the L.P. is a more than worthy addition to anyone's record collection even if it is the only Oldham purchase made. The three triumphs though on this album have to be both Give Me Children and the enchanting The Sun Highlights The Lack In Each, and finally You Have Cum... all I can say is just hold onto every beat of that cheap drum machine and you'll never be far from nourished by Will's dolcit tones here. Understandably, Oldham's music can cause some to to depress, yet it's the beauty within his music that finally wins one over that should be focused on. A true visionary to the ear.

This is one of Will Oldham's best recordings, along with Days in the Wake and I See a Darkness. Combining spare arrangements and sparse instrumentation with world-weary lyrics, Arise, Therefore manages to be both frightening and beautiful. In a culture chock-full of mindless superficiality, this album is a welcome slice of authenticity. Although this is best listened to as a whole, standouts include "A Sucker's Evening", "The Sun Highlights the Lack in Each", and the superb "Disorder". If you are not familiar with Oldham's work, this record is NOT the place to start. Rather, try Viva Last Blues or Greatest Palace Music. Forget Bruce Springsteen. Will Oldham, along with Vic Chesnutt, is America's best songsmith, and Arise, Therefore is further proof of this fact.

Will Oldham will one day be looked back upon as a true poet. Now whether his lyrics lack the mastery to achieve such a title -well, there's more to him. If musically he lacks the mastery to achieve such a title, well there's more to him. His gift lies in the marriage between those two aspects - and through that, you get a glimpse into an intuitive and radiant soul. If you own any album by this enigma of an artist, you will see "Arise Therefore" as a departure from his usual approach. This is his most complete work. It should not be individually broken down by song. The highlights are unmistakeably moving. The low points are completely heartwrenching...I wish I had been there at the "All tomorrow's Parties" festival where he played this album out beginning to end. Let "Arise Therefore" slowly creep into your world...there's no way you couldn't appreciate it if you give it a true chance.

If you had told me that Will Oldham intended to use a drum machine on this album, I wouldn't have believed it. But he did, and the effect is simplistic, sometimes monotonous, but like a heartbeat it is a kind of backbone to his twisted Appalachian folk-country hybrids. His voice, as usual, sounds as tortured as ever, and he gets real quiet at times as though it's all too much. And sometimes it is all too much. The album ends with 'The weaker soldier', a beautiful piece of heartbreak which brings a lump to the throat. This time around, Oldham leaves behind the hillbilly incest of 'There is no one ...' his first album, for something more personal perhaps. It takes more than one listen, but is worth the effort.

I like this album. It is good.

Yes apparently, despite not being an ahem, particularly good musician, Will Oldham somehow (how? how?) has managed to create fragile yet effective and emotionally resonant music. Wow, quite something for someone who is not a musician (presumably making music is not quite enough to make someone a musician...) So, how could an amateur who apparently doesn't know enough about song forms possibly have made music that was moving and made one think etc? Perhaps it was luck, a full moon, ANYTHING except the skill of the artist. Here's a bombshell: when art has an effect on you, it is because someone has spent a very long time, thinking very hard to make something very specific. Then, the traces of effort, the signs of the artist's hand usually have to be disguised, to enhance the power of the work in question: (books, music painting etc). The effect is not an accident (and yes I know all the Death of the Author stuff....) Here's another bombshell; maybe Will Oldham knows more than it sounds like he does, and maybe his songs are indeed full of intertextual references, walking the line between knowing and referential and using a rustic and homespun aesthetic for a purpose? To put it another way, when you watch a magician do a trick, do you credit "magic" or the performer's skill in creating the effect?

I wish I had the patience to review every Will Oldham record. The man knows how to write a song. Were there a lyricist's word for prose poetry, it would be a good way to describe the form, I think. Oldham has a captivating narrative style, the way he combines words, the surprised in the middle of an anecdote, suddenly brutal or sexual. And such charming, funny titles, which may or may not have anything to do with the songs.

Half of the songs I'm not confident I understand, but I think it's like trying to understand an abstract painting. The undestanding comes in being somewhat passive to the song. I love this particular record because of its consistent mood: heavy, pensive, seductive. No big drum crashes or guitar solos. The words hang like smoke. Spread out against the bong water stains and hit play.

A masterpiece of comforting sounds and images. I know of nothing in this world like this record. Like the tender secret that I keep warm and private, I'll only reveal this record to my most intimately trusted friends. If I go around telling everyone about it, I'd feel too exposed. I think I'll make a little velvet pouch to keep my copy in.

This is one of those albums with a personal resonance too deep to be separated from my opinion of the disc as a whole. This is the spare, haunting music that accompanied my summer of '96, a time of aesthetic and personal discovery, tempered with both existential and self-imposed loneliness. Will Oldham's lyrics are poetic and ambiguous, but always seem to connect an aimless, uneasy, backwoods sociality reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's "Suttree" with more abstract and personal anxieties. Meaning opens to khora at the edges of confusion, like the pastoral drawing on the cover that disintegrates into marks in a blank, mute space. The folkish, Appalacchia of Oldham's rough-hewn guitar is here augmented with David Grubb's Morton Feldman-informed piano chords, which hang over the proceedings in beautiful decay. The country-folksiness of his phrasing is undercut by the artful placement and sense of space, fitting perfectly within Oldham's world of high art meets rural low-life. Much has been made of the use of a drum machine, but Steve Albini recorded it with an open air mike, like everything else; and it doesn't occupy any sort of (cyber)space of its own-just a simple clunk from the back of the room. This mix of minimal indie musical molasses and idiot man-child psychoanalysis inhabits an odd corner of its own. It sits there, alone in its head in a smoke-stained room, with Adolf Wolfli and Henry Darger, each biting his fingernails and sweating profusely.