BONNIE PRINCE BILLY - Summer In The Southeast

It's hard to find your bearings among the many releases that have dotted, and continue to dot, Will Oldham's career. One constant could at least be found in the latest incarnation of the bearded Kentucky singer-songwriter (the one going by Bonnie "Prince" Billy): the biennial cadence of his main albums (1999 for the debut "I See a Darkness", 2001 for "Ease Down the Road", 2003 for the most recent "Master And Everyone"). The wait, agonizing given the stature of the man and of the records in question, leaves a bit of a bitter aftertaste, since this year that pattern was broken, and what hit the shelves, instead of the fourth chapter of the saga, was something else entirely. Setting aside the collaborations with Matthew Sweeney and Tortoise, we're talking about "Summer in the Southeast", a live album recorded right after the release of "Superwolf" (ed. note, the album with Sweeney), on tour through the American Southeast (Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and North Carolina).

Let's get straight to the point: "Summer in the Southeast" is neither a typical contractual-obligation record knocked out for some extra cash, nor a simple souvenir snapshot of the collaboration (of which only one track out of seventeen is revisited). Instead, it's the flip side of "…Sings Greatest Palace Music": while on last year's collection Oldham dressed up his classics and polished them to a shine, turning them into classics of the whole American tradition, here we find the songbook in electric, imperfect clothing, yet just as sincere and passionate: simply the man's other soul. We said "clothing" in the singular, but really we should say "clothes" in the plural, since each song finds a different dimension from the next, its own shape, its own story to tell.

It opens with "Master and Everyone", quivering and raw, unspooling lopsidedly over jolts of guitar, wound tight and tense until the pummeling finale. Oldham's sharp, intense voice is at its best here, and that holds true across every track. The classic "Pushkin" (one of only two songs shared with last year's record) instead hangs suspended in mid-air, halfway between dream and rawness, the piano sped up, guitars layered on top of each other, a female voice countering it, ethereal and perfect. "Blokbuster", vivid and quivering, pure emotion, is proof of Oldham's crystalline talent and spectacular form. The range of registers on display is vast: from the tender grace of "Wolf Among Wolves", sighed and howled, to the full-throttle rock of the anthem "May It Always Be", to the country and folk hues coloring the heartfelt "Break of Day", to the tense, murderous execution of the gloomy "A Sucker's Evening", embellished with organ stabs. The overall quality, between peaks and dips, stays consistently high.

Lulling us at the album's midpoint comes the wonderful epic crescendo of "I See a Darkness" (curiously, the three title tracks of the three Bonnie "Prince" Billy albums fall exactly at the start, middle and end of their respective records), a performance as splendid and moving as if it were the first time. The wake-up call comes courtesy of the scratchy "O Let It Be", all guitar arabesques and bites, while the tender "Beast For Thee" carries us into one of the record's many high points, the epic "Death to Everyone", caught between calm and unease, electric guitar stripped bare and glowing red-hot, desolate vocals left bare without music.

The last highlights worth noting are the spare, desolate "Even If Love", the fanfare of "I Send My Love to You" (in quick succession — the sequencing here deserves applause), and the sustained, choral gallop of "Madeleine Mary", before everything settles into the placid country of "Ease Down The Road".

In short, after all that waiting, what we end up with is another fine record, made for open spaces, meant to be lived rather than simply listened to. And indeed, the first thing that comes to mind is the urge to go experience Will Oldham live — in all likelihood, today, the finest "classic"-style singer-songwriter around (and even calling him that feels reductive): "Summer In The Southeast" is proof of just what awaits.

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30/04/2026