Sunday, May 20, 2012
And We Can Stop Our Whoring and Put Our Smiles Inside
Bonnie Prince Billy (and all Will Oldham productions) is in the short orbit of rotating musicians for the two remaining open seats on my sillyass desert island game. He has a new release this June, remake/remodelings of old songs, including the above. When I heard of the project my first thought was Kate Bush (who has a permanent spot on the island) and the merely bad Director's Cut and Peter Gabriel (who, while not in the rotation, is an honored saint of Egoslavia) and the shockingly awful Live Blood, both albums that scream I've run out of ideas, you're a fan, you'll buy anything.* (Bush, I rush to credit her, has since released the magical and wonderful and all new 50 Words for Snow). I don't know why Oldham is remaking/remodeling, and even if he's doing it for the coin, the new I See a Darkness is clever and funny and different enough from the original that it feels almost genuinely reconceived rather than just differently recorded. I recognize my faith in my faithlessness in my faith's faithfulness has umpteen thumbs on the scale. Here's the original:
*Yes, I'm aware to the irony.
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Gabriel's cover album was tremendously disappointing to the Zombie, and wrote a whole post'o'hate about it, but it is at the old, decrepit, abandoned and condemned Empire and is no longer available to the general public, for safety's sake.
ReplyDeleteI nearly popped a rivet at the nasty cover of the Magnetic Fields song.
to the point that I thought the album where he similarly mis-treated his own songs was a step UP.
But I would not pay good money to see him parade his lack of ideas in the live venue, when he was touring that crap-parade; and cannot be arsed to give a shit about this live album of it, as there is a new Garbage album coming out that can NOT POSSIBLY BE AS BAD. Gabriel, you are on fucking NOTICE.
The Bonnie "Prince" Billy news is intriguing. I stepped off the Oldham bus quite a while ago, but the last record of his I really liked was the unfairly maligned Sings Greatest Palace Music, which was obviously a somewhat similar project.
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