Palace Brothers
Days in the Wake

THE REVIEW

If there's one artist who more than any other can express through music the malaise of living, the sense of human solitude, the nakedness in the face of emotions and feelings, that artist is undoubtedly Will Oldham. And in this album, dated 1994 and released under one of Will's many pseudonyms "Palace," it serves as a touching and unsettling example at the same time. Musically essential, with the guitar supporting Will's trembling and bitter voice, this album manages to evoke the Nick Drake of "Pink Moon" in its musical themes and songwriting, accompanied by lyrics of monumental beauty and abyssal poetic depth.

When you have no-one/No-one can hurt you, with these simple words opens "You Will Miss Me When I Burn", a song that with each replay wounds you with its simplicity, leaves a mark, burns inside like a fire. A song about abandonment and lack of love, a song where "hell is other people," a song laden with ominous portents and melancholy teetering on the brink of depression. A masterpiece. The intimate dialogue becomes even more pronounced in "Pushkin", whose text, enigmatic and borderline incomprehensible, starkly contrasts with the seemingly serene musical atmosphere of the track. God is the answer, repeats the chorus, but it feels like Will doesn't quite believe it, in a plea for help that is also a profession of faith for the man torn by doubts and the sense of life.

In this sort of affective ambivalence plays out the entirety of "I Send My Love To You", a song filled with irony but with widespread bitterness, in the desire to reflect in the other, in the search for a dialogue. Themes that appear in all their unsettling beauty in other tracks of the album like "Whither Thou Goest" and "(Thou Without) Partner". The album closes with an autobiographical and bitterly ironic ballad, "I Am A Cinematographer", where themes of abandonment of family affections appear (If you were alone/You could walk away from Louisville alone), uncertainty (And I walked away from everything that's good), the stubborn solitude of the "loner" ("I was a big old bear once").

It's as if in this album, in less than thirty minutes, all the fundamental themes of modern man have coagulated. Congealed into an acoustic guitar, in a voice intense and fragile like an unrequited passion, in songs where there is no certainty, except for their extraordinary beauty and truth.