What an album cover! It's the kind that would fit perfectly with the whole music sounding like album cover mantra that makes for a great last resort when you can't really come up with a good description of the music within on your own. With enough embellishing, it can work for almost every album ever created. But alas, Will Oldham (employing his current nom de plume Bonnie "Prince" Billy) and Matt Sweeney (of Chavez and Zwan fame) have created an album full of brand new songs you've known your whole life that sounds more akin to listening to your most creepily enigmatic uncle talk to himself on his back porch than, say, slowly drowning after slicing your wrists.
Oldham himself is practically the personification of the American songwriter. His voice and songs are intensely personal, yet inviting and even warm at times. It's not difficult to imagine his work being hammered out on an authentic back porch with an acoustic guitar and an old hunting hound at his feet, which is more than most of his neo-folk contemporaries can say. There's an undeniable genuineness and sincerity throughout his material, especially 1999's macabre I See a Darkness and now Superwolf, arguably his finest record since the aforementioned chef-d'oeuvre.
The quasi-epic "My Home is the Sea" (as well as the lines, "I have often said/ that I would like to be dead/ in a shark's mouth") opens the album on a somewhat misleading note, easily more lighthearted (despite the morbid lyrics) and full-sounding than the rest of the album's stark, minimalist statements. The sharp twang of guitar that hits about halfway through the song is one of the album's finest and most memorable moments. From hereon in, Superwolf assumes a much more private, reserved form excepting the loud choral bursts in "Goat and Ram."
The phrase "achingly beautiful" sums up the rest of Superwolf pretty well. The songs drip pensive melancholia while eschewing melodrama, creating an uneasy atmosphere throughout its duration. Bittersweet harmonies and barely audible guitar lines contribute to songs that are paradoxically emotional and aloof at the same time. "Rudy Foolish" is remarkably poignant, containing one of Oldham's best vocal performances backed by Sweeney's exceptional sense of harmony. The sampled voice of a woman confessing her infidelity to a presumed husband towards the end of "Blood Embrace" lends an almost unbearably tense atmosphere to an already hushed, shadowy song.
Teaming up with Sweeney seemed to be the perfect career move for Oldham, an artist whose work fell into a bit of a slump after I See a Darkness. I trust that Superwolf will creep its way onto my best of 2005 list come the year's closing stages, even if it's nothing like the album cover.
