The Sundowners

will oldham + bill callahan = the sundowners

1994 goat songs / V0

1996 the girl with the thing in the hair / V0

Palace Brothers

(1993) Palace Brothers - There is No-One what Will Take Care of You / V0
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Carrie Yury (feat. Will Oldham)

(2005) Carrie Yury (feat. Will and Paul Oldham, Colin Gagon, and Richard Schuler) - Mutter / 192k
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"Back in June, the California-based photographer and Dolce Volante alum Carrie Yury displayed 700 free copies of her latest solo outing, the Mutter EP, in light-box towers at LA Design Center, and the exhibition itself seems to serve as an interesting bit of context to the incredibly engaging six-song disc.
(...)Recorded in Shelbyville, Kentucky in May, the disc is tender and fragile in the most human of ways — a 23-minute collection of folk-pop gems that are as a beautiful as they are beautifully understated. Far from the cold and well-plotted precision of the LA Design Center installation, the disc is warm and disarming and clearly benefits from the comforting charms of contributors Will and Paul Oldham, Colin Gagon, and Richard Schuler. While Schuler's able drum work may be best known from King Kong and the early days of Louisville punk heroes Squirrel Bait, it's the musical context brought to the table by Gagon and the Oldhams that may be most identifiable by listeners, a colloquial kind of folk-pop that may have defined itself best on post-Palace outings like Joya or Ease Down The Road."
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Will Oldham

(1998) Black / Rich Music EP / V0
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Amazon.com
Originally commissioned for a film, The Broken Giant, and released in 1996 in a very limited edition, this 20-minute disc has four rather vague songs (with a bit of lyrics lifted from D.H. Lawrence) and four brief instrumentals on their themes. The instrumentation's minimal--acoustic guitar, a little bit of wheezy organ--making it closer to Palace Brothers' Days in the Wake than anything else Oldham's done. At times, the lyrics seem like he's feverish and hallucinating, especially "The Risen Lord," with its broken singing about fear of life, and "Black/Rich Tune," which is barely even a song: constantly on the verge of collapse, though the rough beauty of the organ acts like a vivid brushstroke, a minimal gesture that affirms life.

Marquis de Tren & Bonny Billy

(2000) Marquis de Tren & Bonny Billy
Get on Jolly
192k, Palace Records
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(2000) Marquis de Tren & Bonny Billy
Get the Fuck on Jolly Live
192k, Palace Records
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Anonymous said... This review is rediculous. Maybe one good advice might be not to listen to an album with expectations but with an open mind. I love it. Thanks!

fakejazz:
Bonny Billy (a.k.a. Bonnie "Prince" Billy) = Will Oldham (of the Palace variations)
The Marquis de Tren = Mick Turner (of the Dirty Three).

Given the involvement of such heavyweights in this little project (six songs, 22 minutes), one's hopes may rise beyond the point of sustainability. The purpose of this review is: don't get your hopes up.

For those who are familiar with the previous work of the involved parties, the overall tone is appropriately melancholy and maudlin. The pace is slow. The atmosphere is heavy. However, the melodies are underdeveloped and abstract. The songs wander along like a drunk in love, who knows not wither his lover lie. The various overdubbed guitars on "25" (the songs are only numbered, not named) sound like an orchestra tuning up, rather than any musician playing a song. The instruments on "2/15," guitar, bass, accordion, and some backwards sounds, have no appearance of being played on the same song, but seem randomly assembled. Only the last two tracks, "64" and "66" rise to the level of a focused, coherent tune (maybe it's the presence of drums on those tracks, that keep them in line).