Bonnie "Prince" Billy
The Letting Go

"The Letting Go" or "a season between summer, autumn, the deep America and high Iceland".

It's strange to find myself already reviewing a new album by Bonnie "Prince" Billy. On average, he releases one and a half per year. Not to mention the collaborations and E.P.s!
It's strange trying to understand where this work is situated, perhaps in an ideal space between the mid-west (or the south-east of his summer?) and Iceland, where it was actually recorded with the attentive care of Valgeir Sigurdsson, who has already produced for Bjork. Strange character, this Bonnie "Prince" Billy, poet of a thousand names, a bit shabby, a bit wolf-like, slightly drunk.
His pen and guitar give birth to sincere and intimate compositions, outside of time, out of this indie time, difficult to insert into folk revival, new acoustic, low-fi and the like. The paths of his voice, of his writing seem embedded among the mountains, glaciers, and lakes of his album covers, those photos where it's unclear where summer ends and autumn begins, or another season, a season all his own, the season of Will Oldham.

Where "Ease Down The Road" ends, "The Letting Go" begins, the banjo gives way to delicate orchestras, sometimes fierce, never manneristic. The author relies less on catchy tunes and lost ditties and starts again with a slower, melancholic, and serene singer-songwriter style at the same time. The path started with "After I Made Love To You" continues with the vocal intertwining of "No Bad News", but it's just an example that well represents the tone of the album, constant without being repetitive. Oldham's voice is that of the wolf in love with the nightingale, his stories seem like an acoustic twist of the fables of Oscar Wilde, Aesop, the Grimms, or Andersen.

A wolf among wolves, a man among men, to use his own words. The orchestral crescendo of "Cursed Sleep" brings us back to the eternal restlessness of the artist, with "Cold & Wet" we hear a lament coming from some ghost town in the old west, in the supreme "God's Small Song" ice ghosts echo, "I Called You Back" is a sweet pursuit of trumpet, slide guitar, and piano...... but I don't want to insist on describing the songs, I won't try to grasp their constructive principles and weak links: I just want to invite you to reach the nearest mountains, lie on a meadow and as darkness falls and September approaches, let the magic of the fable of the wolf and the nightingale slip into you, of their flight between anguish and love... it's strange to be transported to that season magically suspended between summer, autumn, deep America and high Iceland, isn't it?