Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You Album Review – Warungku Terkini

Will Oldham, now 53, has not sounded young for a quarter-century. Perhaps he last did in the waning days of Palace Music, back when he sang about wanting to “fuck a mountain” with unmistakable élan or fretted about wasting his life beneath the dim bar light, back when he was “younger folk as we.” But at least since I See a Darkness, his career-affirming 1999 debut as Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Oldham has suggested the shellshocked canary emerging from some Kentucky coal mine, sharing the news of what he’d seen down below—death and sex, love and rejection, doom and wonder—in a prematurely aged warble. As a singer, Oldham has always seemed an anachronism against our perennial advance. As a bandleader, however, he has long been dubious of conventions, bending the folk, country, and blues forms he understood so deeply into radical, intuitive shapes. There have been ginger acoustic exceptions, of course, but from his ramshackle start to the gilded surrealism of 2019’s I Made a Place, Oldham has sought new settings for his antediluvian tone.

Drummer-less and devoid of electric instruments, Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You—as stinging as a switch, as soft as a parent’s embrace—feels as if Oldham is finally facing both his age and place, reconciling them through quiet songs that speak loudly. He is the longtime troubadour and relatively new father loading whatever insights, aggravations, and ambitions he has gathered into songs that are close to the marrow, mostly clear of sinew. These dozen songs move as if written at a kitchen table as his family sleeps nearby, with quiet dawns illuminating anthems of perseverance and joy and rustling darkness supplying moments of apocalyptic vision. They sound domestic, too, like some friends with fiddles and horns simply swung by on a Sunday afternoon to try out some new stuff in the living room. “Usually I can be found with my family,” Oldham sings at one point with measured warmth, “courageous and careful and loving our now, and wow.”

As ever, Oldham does not shy from darkness. Just seconds after he hits the one-minute mark of opener “Like It or Not,” where a jaunty jangle is a Trojan horse for certain oblivion, he reminds us that “everyone dies in the end, so there’s nothing to hide.” There are goodbyes and losses, acts of vengeance and moments of scorn. Hand upon hand, his family marches into slaughter, and, at some inevitable point, the “grueling death bell knells.”