Customer Reviews

There Is No One What Will Take

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Oldham tacks a "Brothers" onto the Palace monicker, perhaps intentionally harking back to a time when groups were thus forthrightly named. And indeed, the music this time around is more Bill Monroe than Sonic Youth - there's even a sort of yodel, or a feeble hooting anyway, on "I Had a Good Mother And Father." A more gloomy and daunting track is "Riding," a throwback to the darkest of folk ballads, voices from the grave that tell of incest, abductions and worse. Oldham relies on these old tales and draws deeply from the hillbilly's Pentacostal fear of God. God, sin, prayer, and walking with Jesus are the foundations of the album. "Idle Hands Are the Devil's Playthings" is told as a straightforward morality tale; "(I Was Drunk At the) Pulpit" is a rambling, breathless first-person tale of debauchery though "I knew it was wrong." However, Oldham is not a hick, but has a poet's gift of language. "The sunlight was stronger to my Church-dark

widened eyes," runs an early line in "Pulpit." It aptly encompasses Oldham's struggle with man's baser and nobler urges.

This music is the real deal. It never sounds stagey or forced. It sounds like Oldham has lived these arcane hillbilly dirges. His voice sounds so weary and threadbare... a cracked, keening mountain tenor that could chill Ralph Stanley's blood. The songs are odd patchworks of post-modernist wanderings and reconstructed folk ballads. The band is wonderfully unprofessional, stepping all over each other and sounding totally off-kilter. The recording is homespun... that's what adds the emotional edge and works this disc deep into your heart. It's a blurry photograph of a ravaged landscape.

Ahem, I have some glorious memories attached to this record. I had just moved to Atlanta, Ga for school when it came out. I went into Wuxtry records(still the best record store ever!!) and was looking for something new, since the small town I had moved from had no indie stores. I was already a fan of Royal Trux, so I spotted the Drag City logo on the back and decided to buy it. I listened to that CD religously every day for about a year. I love everything about it. How the band sounds like they might fall apart at any second, but never really does. I imagined them playing in a barn on a red-dirt floor with only one mic to record into and the guitarist having to step up to the mic for his solo's. Will channels the southern-gothic ambience of Flannery O' Connor and Carson McCullers perfectly. This made me a life-long fan of Mr. Oldham and I have purchased every release of his since. But since this is the one that hooked me, I always find myself going back to it. Besides, in my opinion, he hasn't recorded a finer song than "Merida" since. I remember seeing him on the "I See A Darkness" tour and I asked him to play it, and he said he didn't remember how too, I was so shocked!! Will is still turning out the great tunes, I recomend this one first since it is one of the most primitive, if you enjoy it, then you will love them all!!

OK, so Will Oldham, aka "Palace Brothers," is really nothing more than a smirking, erudite, cappucino drinker/indie rocker. But at least he makes music that is so absolutely absurd, creepy, and beautiful, I must forgive him for dropping his album-sales dollars in all the retro diners of Manhattan. And I find that transgression hard to forgive. This album is absolutely stunning. Using nothing more than a banjo, an acoustic guitar, and a cracking voice that makes J Mascis sound like Celine Dion, Oldham performs the most haunting hillbilly hellfire hoedown these ears have ever heard. Of course, I live in a major East coast metropolis that boasts running water and futuristic luxuries like phones, so maybe I just haven't heard enough of this kind of thing, but still. On the album, Oldham sends shout-outs to his homeboy Satan, his dead mom, incest, body-cavity odors, whiskey, Paul, and lots of other fun stuff. It leaves one wondering if it was recorded on the bridge under which Burt Reynolds and Jon Voight canoed. Ned Beatty probably shudders and shouts "don't pull my ear, don't pull on my ear!" every time somebody pops this CD in a stereo. And seriously, its authenticity is remarkable, considering its Ivy-educated source. It manages to be pretty, frightening, and funny at once. So Bravo, Will! Have a double decaf cappucino on me, you hipster dufus. A great album to have, if you like to drink and brood to twisted country.

This is good. Simple, honest, and nothing more. Very few people I know truly enjoy this album, most of the time I end up listening to it alone. "I Was Drunk at the Pulpit" proves that one can write a song using only one chord...

This album is a great mixture of the sacred and the profane a la Will Oldham. Beautiful alter hymns and down in the earth blues - another definite LP to have and vinyl is the only way to hear this...

The first Palace Brothers CD is unavailable where I live, so I ordered it at Amazon. Well, it was the only Palace record I didn't already have, and boy am I glad I have it now. It must be the best album ever made by Mister Oldham and his "relatives". I received the disc yesterday and have listened to it 15 times already. Great, an absolute masterpiece. Deserves to be in anybody's collection, though it's clear that not everybody likes alternative country (what a shame, the world would be a better place).

Well, well. One can spend a lifetime searching for music like this. If you're ready, this album (and most of his others) will beckon you into a new state of being. Raw and alive, it simply issues from a depth of subtlety few artists even touch.

not Harvard. I liked the self-titled CD better, personally

Pavement may have invented Indie but The Palace Brothers perfected it. The goal of Indie bands, of course, is to sound amateurish, and the Palace Brothers have it down to a science. From the crudely painted cover to the unwieldy album title to the ever changing name of the band, the Palace Brothers ooze that unfinished mastery that all Indie bands strive for. This album really sounds like a live album of a concert in your living room recorded with your old mono cassette deck. Even the vocals are to strained to be real, as if the vocalist blew out his voice singing in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen the night before. It really sounds like a tape you made when you were ten, but you have to ask yourself, do you really want to listen to that? The quandary of Indie is simply this, does amateurish equal good? In the end amateurish is just amateurish, and there is a reason that bands strive for `studio perfection'. If you're into Indie, you'll love it, no doubt, but if your into a more polished sound this album will not convert you. I did like the fiddle. Best tracks are `Idle Hands Are The Devil's Playthings' and (I Was Drunk At The) Pulpit'.