From Cubist Castle 01.23.09: I See A Darkness

Posted by Jon Kinsey on 01.23.2009

Two weeks ago, From Cubist Castle went back to 1999 and took a sneaky peak at what was happening in the world of music a decade ago. This week, we look at an album which I believe was the best of the year and, possibly, the whole of the 1990s - Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s I See a Darkness

Two weeks ago, From Cubist Castle went back to 1999 and took a sneaky peak at what was happening in the world of music a decade ago. This week, we look at an album which I believe was the best of the year and, possibly, the whole of the 1990s - Bonnie "Prince" Billy's I See a Darkness

Bonnie "Prince" Billy is one of many pseudonyms for the Kentucky born songwriter Will Oldham, who had, before 1999, been recording and releasing music for five years under various iterations of the Palace name. He started his professional career as an actor and put together a couple of award winning performances in his late teens, before suffering a mental breakdown that culminated in his fleeing to Czechoslovakia. Upon his return to the USA, his brother took hold of some scrappy lyrics he had constructed in the wilderness and suggested that he might want to try recording some songs, as a cathartic exercise. From the guts of his nadir came There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You, Oldham's first album, released under the guise of the Palace Brothers in order to afford him the luxury of disassociating his fragile mind from the sum of his hubris.

This debut set the template for all of the Palace releases to come. Thematically, it dealt with subjects that have since become Oldham standards – sex, death and religion. These are themes that became pervasive throughout his work in the 1990's. Particularly prominent in the Palace recordings was Oldham's obsession with the juxtaposition of sexual and violent imagery, or raking over the more twisted aspects of human sexuality. His first release alone contained songs about incest and sexual abandon and, in the album's standout track "Long Before", he uses some appallingly violent imagery to express his narrators feelings of disgust over his mother's abandonment of his father.

Till we see fit to stand before
That virgin cunt, that sainted whore
Whose piss we have slept under
Whose smell we have bore
Is her heelprint that marks our faces?

Particularly in those early albums, sex was a common theme but rarely, if ever, did Oldham refer to it in the context of a stable, loving relationship. To him, it was something violent, something twisted and abnormal. If the act of copulation were to be used by Oldham, it would often be in the form of brutal metaphor. On "Tonight's Decision and Hereafter", he talks of raping the personification of death in order that new life could be born into the world:

I have heard death cry, I have heard him falter
I have heard him lie and escape unscathed
When he comes for me I will fuck him, o
I will waste him in my own way

He also dealt unconventionally with the issue of religion. While the southern musical tradition often called for a reverential attitude towards God and the mechanisms of religion, Oldham was more cautious. For him, religious figures were not omnipotent and beyond reproach. They were flawed reflections of the society that they represented. "(I Was Drunk At The) Pulpit" talks of on intemperate preacher who loses his faith in the realization that there is more honesty and truth in a pub full of friends than in a church full of hypocrites.

If then in thematic terms, Oldham was less than conventional, his musical influences were rooted in deep tradition. You would be forgiven for thinking on first listen that the songs first couple of Palace albums were Appalachian classics. The instrumentation was exceptionally traditional. For many songs, the banjo was to be the lead instrument. Everything in those early recordings sounds organic – they sound almost like a front porch jam with friends rather than a carefully constructed musical statement. This underlying ambience was encouraged by Oldham's recording methods. He would make sure that his backing band arrived to the recording with no idea what they would be playing. Each person would be given their individual pieces of music when they arrive and the songs would then be recorded in one take with no rehearsal. This gave the finished product a decidedly ramshackle air, with songs often ending abruptly or in discord. It was, to a certain extent, a little unprofessional as several of those early songs seemed unfinished.

And so this continued, throughout the Nineties, until the dawning of 1999, and the release of his magnum opus.

The reason that I have spent the early part of this article emphasizing the history of Oldham's output is so that I can put into perspective just how radically different "I See a Darkness" was to anything that he had gone before it. When Oldham reinvented himself as Billy, he also seemed to reinvent his musical outlook. From a decade's safe remove, it is perhaps difficult to grasp how shocking this album was when it arrived on the market. Music journalists were unsurprisingly expecting another great, but off kilter folk album. What arrived took everyone by surprise.

The first major difference is that it is a well-polished, complete work. There is no desire to obfuscate the message of the songs with poor musicianship as there had been on some of the older albums. One has always got the impression that there was an element of self-sabotage in Oldham's work, possibly stemming from the same pathological fear of fame that that drove him to change his nom de plume every couple of albums. If he places artificial constraints upon the musicians, then they will not perform to the best of their ability, thus diminishing the final product. People are therefore less likely to enjoy it and there is little chance of him becoming a celebrity. This is, after all, the man who once took three songs off an album because they were too good – the anxiety that too many people would buy it caused him to be physically ill.

There seems to be no such concern here, however. Oldham seems to have come to terms with the idea that some people will like what he does regardless of the spanners that he will throw into the works and, even if he hasn't accepted it, he at least seems capable of staving off his neurosis for long enough to turn out an album that is cohesive from top to bottom. Each track seems to have been crafted, built layer by layer, instrument by instrument, rather than simply being thrown together ad hoc. There is a definite sense that that a good deal of time and thought has gone into making this album. This was certainly no one-take wonder. God forbid, there may even have been rehearsals! It is bound together in a way that is entirely unlike his previous efforts. If There Is No-One What Will Take Care of You was Oldham's difficult birth into the music industry, then I See a Darkness is most certainly his triumphant coming of age.

Possibly the greatest indicator of Oldham's progressing musical maturity comes when you listen to his voice. In the days gone by, his vocals were rough, borderline tuneless and liable to break mid way through. If you were a lazy journalist, you probably wrote them off as "faux-Appalachian", in the same way as Joanna Newsom and Cat Power have often been deconstructed. Maybe this style of delivery was the manifestation of another aspect of Oldham's desire to hide himself within himself. On I See a Darkness, his vocal work is, at times, transcendent, evoking desire, fear, lust and weariness, sometimes channeling two or three seemingly at once. One of the reasons this album is so much greater than those that have gone before is that Oldham finally found a way to imbue his words with the same gravity when sung as they always possessed when written down.

The musical arrangement is also overhauled. This is an album, which, for the most part, sheds the folk trappings of its predecessors. While there are occasions where they peer like poor relations around the corner, (most noticeably on "Today I Was a Lonely One") what we have here is for the most part an entirely different sonic palette. I am going to jump out on a limb and assume that somebody incinerated the studio banjo before this album was conceived, because it does not appear anywhere. Rather, it has been replaced in the "Will Oldham lead instrument pantheon" by a piano, which seems to feature on every track.

With its introduction, the whole tone and mood of the album shifts. The Palace albums are jagged, torn affairs. Each song had a beginning and then, generally, lurched to an early abortion, without any real theme or mood to link them. I See A Darkness is whole. It is complete. The sum of its parts are extraordinary and yet, miraculously perhaps, the whole is even greater still. Once you have played it a couple of times, you will begin to notice that it engenders its own atmosphere and ambience. It is liable to envelop the listener and smother them. This is the mark of some very strong songwriting indeed.


The album kicks off with "A Minor Place", which introduces the primacy of the piano immediately. A clanging chord, followed by the subdued bass and drum line that pulses along in the background like a heartbeat – you don't really notice it, but you would know something was missing if it wasn't there. Then the vocals kick in. Through the markedly upbeat sounding chorus and into the verses. As can be the case, your first impression might not necessarily be correct. Yes, this song sounds upbeat but, as if lulling you into a false sense of security, Oldham throws this verse in:

Only take the weather warm
And the job that does me harm
The scars of last year's storm
Rest like maggots on my arm

and suddenly you are forced to question what exactly you thought was going on. Yes, the music is almost jaunty by Oldham's standards, but the lyrics are deceptively downbeat. There is a definite paradox at work here. The vocal and the music makes you want to smile, but the lyrics hold a darker edge. A reviewer once pointed out a fact relating to this song that I would easily have missed – it is called "A Minor Place", and is vaguely sad, but the whole song is played in major key. This degree of planning would never have been possible in the Palace Days.

From here, we move swiftly on to "Nomadic Revery", which emphasizes the thematic shift in Oldham's lyric work. Whereas previously it was rare to find a genuinely affirmative Palace song, this track almost wallows in its positivity. It is, in effect, a tale of the protagonist who is away from home imagining the journey he will be taking in the near future and his reunion with his loved one. It also book marks a change in his Oldham's slant on sexual imagery. Rather than obvious, brutal, violent or sordid imagery, this is how he paints their sexual reacquaintance:

O all around a left buttock
And all around a right
All around your every curve
I'm going to go tonight
But only hold me, hold me
All the city's on me
And all they wish to scold me
And lay their hands upon me
So only hold me, hold me
And I'll return to you baby
I just need an evening
With someone nice to hide me

For once, sex is an enjoyable, fulfilling and even nurturing experience to the recipient, who feels comfortable and protected by the intimate presence of his partner. Oldham would eventually return to candid descriptions of physical sexuality on his next album, but for now at least, he proved that there is an ounce of romance tucked away within him.

And then comes the sledgehammer. Tracks three and four, my favorite tracks on this album and, in all likelihood, two of my favorite tracks on any recording – "I See A Darkness" and "Another Day Full of Dread". Between then, they manage to take all of the goodness that the album's opening tracks impart upon the listener and blow it all to buggery, establishing two of the running lyrical themes of the recording – depression and the sense of being at odds with the world.

"I See A Darkness" is ostensibly a tale of two friends, cut adrift in society and hoping for better days. Under this, though, is a subtext of a protagonist plagued by his own depressive tendencies asking his comrade for absolution.

Many Times we've been out drinking
and many times we shared our thoughts
did you ever, ever notice
the kind of thoughts I got

The "Darkness" in this song is a metaphor for the veil of depression that haunts him internally, and the friend is seen as his avenue of escape

I see a darkness
Do you know how much I love you
There's a thought that somehow you
Can save me from this darkness

There is an enormous undercurrent of power to the words of this song, emphasized and magnified by the minimalism of the musical accompaniment. The orchestration is bare, to say the least, and consists of one piano tapping almost inperceptively in the background. Because your brain is undistracted by the musical garnish, it is better able to focus on the words, which are as stark and unmovable as a monolith.

"Another Day Full Of Dread", continues the theme through the eyes of a narrator whose depression causes him to be so unable to function that he drives away his remaining friends. In what might possibly be my favorite verse in music, Oldham's narrator analyses his own mental state, his neuroses and his fear of death, by comparing it to the ideals of existential philosophy:

Today was another day full of dread
But I never said I was afraid
For dread and fear should not be confused
By dread I'm inspired, by fear I'm amused

This, to me, is so soul searingly poetic, I have absolutely no shame in admitting that I bawled like a baby when I first heard it. There is a clear duality here that is common from great poets, but rarely, if ever, seen in music. How one verse can epitomize a man's darkest moments yet, at the same time, be inspiringly uplifting is entirely beyond my ken.

Next up, we have "Death To Everyone", a tongue in cheek look at human mortality, which seems to suggest that embracing the idea that you will die might just lead to better sex and "Madeleine-Mary" which is the album's rocker. A full-fledged barnburner complete with guitar reverb and vocal echoing, which means it stands out here like a rhino on a ski lift. This is a track that swims with water imagery and lyrical allusions the sea. This song contains one of the albums most pointed and obvious reference to death, spelled out in the fate of a man who loved the eponymous Madeleine-Mary and subsequently drowned

So now my kids you'd like to hear
Of one who reached and got her
Well if there was well I think
He sleeps beneath the water

From the depths of the sea, we emerge to be greeted with "A Song For The New Breed" , which is, for me, the most curious offering of the album. Over the course of my five or six years of listening to "I See a Darkness", I have at various times interpreted it in various different ways. But am now convinced that the beast is an aspect of the narrator.

Your little feet
Your sharp teeth
The way the light hits your eyes
Your scrappy fur
Your fists
The light from the lord
That shines inside

Inside of me
Inside of me
Something is growing
Something is glowing
Someone is showing

Sing a song for the new breed
Inside of me

The "new breed" as the personification of the more animal urges and desires of the man within whom it dwells. It is a song bounded by metaphor and because of the picture that is painted, one can imagine the protagonist's anger and pain and suffering taking form and manifesting upon the unsuspecting world. The disturbing facet of this song, and something that is, more or less, a theme for the whole album, is that the narrator seems happy to accept his dark side, almost looking forward to its exhumation onto the Earth. This is not a man ashamed of his impulses. He is happy to embrace them and that makes the characterization in this track all the more human and exceptionally sinister!

After the Appalachianeque "Today I was A Lonely One", and "Black", an allegorical parable about the duality of depression, Oldham concludes with what is possibly the most upbeat and positive song in his entire catalog – "Raining In Darling".

You get a definite sense listening to Oldham's vocal on this track that he is enjoying himself and that he actually believes in what he is singing. This is the closest he will ever get to writing a balls out backs to the wall genuine love song. The final verse is so moving, as his voice soars, he has found the medicine to turn his life around

O it don't rain anymore
I go outdoors
Where it's fun to be
And I know you love me
I know you do

By positioning this as the last track on the album, Oldham sends out a clear message to the listener – "Yes the world is a pretty bleak place. Things go wrong and sometimes you will feel like shit but, you know what, there is some good in life and in the ones you love" By casting the veil of darkness over the listener for the course of the album, this single speck of light is much brighter by comparison. Though the rest of the album is morbidly oppressive at times, you go away from it with a feeling of optimism, because he has left this song in your brain.

And with that, he winds up the most remarkable, unfathomable and brilliant album of the 1990s. The die was cast and this became album of the year for almost everyone who matters. It is a difficult piece at times, soul searching and disaffecting, but it is ultimately beautiful. It is also slightly tragic because you know, deep down, somewhere in the place inside you where words do not matter, you know that you will probably never hear anything quite so wonderful again. That is both its blessing and its curse, its alpha and its omega. Its light and its darkness.