•
Rating: Between city and countryside there is a dichotomy: an abyss.
On one side the world is wounded, in every possible way. On the other, one takes refuge from the world: becoming tiny, offering an eye, a soul, and assistance to the hoopoe injured by the hailstorm; wandering in a barley field at sunset and healing with walking and effort.
The skin, in a city, gets dirty: the soul retreats to a corner, punched, the pupil dilates for a vague and irrational sense of terror, and the solitude of the fields is swept away by isolation, its grotesque and malicious twin.
The city and its bleak suburbs gave rise to Einstürzende Neubauten, Throbbing Gristle, Joy Division. A lineage of musically diverse bands but united by a deep layer of anger, alienation, depression, urban pain.
If I have to think of an artist born of a field left to rest, it is without a doubt Will Oldham.
"Lie Down in the Light" is an album of tender twilight, of subtle light. The deep vein that Will taps into is always folk music. Transformed into an uneasy masterpiece as in "You Remind Me of Something (The Glory Goes)" or offered as a tribute to Shannon Stephens (the splendid "I'll be glad") Will works on the music with the calm and love of a true craftsman.
In 2008, nearly ten years have passed since the greatest masterpiece "I see a darkness": ten, but it could be seventy times as many.
In '99 Will seemed lost in a dark world of shadows, where redemption seemed as distant as his voice and as the skeletons he sang about (remember "Death to everyone"? )
"Lie down in the light" is the work of a man and an artist who seems to have allowed a new unrest tempered by small earthly joys to enter him, replacing the extreme bitterness and disillusionment of past years; though a traveler burdened with too many stones cannot lose them all along the way.
"For every drought there is a rain"
Drought never disappears: it is the eternal plague that afflicts land, crop, and man, casting into prostration and nullifying the meaning of the day with its blinding heat.
Rain as one of the cures, total like love but equally quick to exhaust its effectiveness; the mole, another plague of crops, becomes a metaphor for blindness as another cure against the blows of random pain.
"For every field there is a mole
With the soil that he stole
And the sightlessness that lets him go free"
Nothing is missing from "Lie down in the Light" to be defined as a masterpiece. Songs, and nothing more. But endowed with that mysterious gift that Will Oldham is one of the few capable of infusing into music. "You want that picture" is the folk-rock ballad sung with Ashley Webber (a perfect voice, fragile and sincere like few others) that exemplifies the genius of Oldham and the soul of this album: any description is pointless, and a single listen is enough to love it.
"But then I went outdoors
And I stood very still in the night
And I looked at the sky
And knew someday I'd die
And then everything would be all right"
Another tear shed on the ground by the prince. But on its surface this time a (fragile) smile can be seen.
Tracklist
Loading comments slowly
