Product Description

'The Letting Go' is the fourth original full length solo release from alt.country singer-songwriter Will Oldham in his Bonnie "Prince" Billy guise. Recorded in Iceland and produced by Valgeir Sigurdsson (Bjork, Mum), this is an album of brooding lyrical lines supported by string quartet flourishes,acoustic guitar and the backing vocals of Dawn McCarthy of Faun Fables. Includes the single 'Cursed Sleep'.

Track Listing

1. Love Comes To Me
2. Strange Form Of Life
3. Wai
4. Cursed Sleep
5. No Bad News
6. Cold And Wet
7. Big Friday
8. Lay And Love
9. Seedling
10. Then The Letting Go
11. God's Small Song
12. I Called You Back

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10743 in Music
• Released on: 2006-09-18
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

Will Oldham duets with Dawn McCarthy on atmospheric - and accessible - collection
The prolific prince of the indescribable, Will Oldham has shapeshifted his way through album after album of delicately profound Americana. It's often said that the mark of genius is the ability to be unbearably moving with very little, and Oldham's shortcomings as a singer and musician are also his greatest strengths. His music is elusive, resisting categorisation: you can call it folk, you can call it alt/country, but Superwolf, last year's collaboration with Matt Sweeney, was all smouldering sexuality and yearning blues.

This album is cooler and sweeter, recorded in Reykjavik under the aegis of Bjork collaborator Valgier Sigurdsson. The arrangements are more complex than perhaps we're used to from a Prince Billy album - strings, flugelhorn and piano spin a subtle but strong tracery of shapes around the musical themes. Singer Dawn McCarthy of Faun Fables provides an airy soprano counterpoint to Oldham's fragile growl, adding a clearer outline to many of the odder melodies.

The songs are as various as ever. Album opener Love Comes To Me is almost unbearable tender, breathing belief in human love in a world where religious faith has been lost. Cold and Wet has a bluesy, lubricious feel. No Bad News is redolent of 70s golden-age folk, Oldham's close-miked murmured intimacy contrasting with McCarthy's layered birdsong. Strange Form of Life has such a powerful instrumental hook that it seems more like a lead-off single than the haunted, Superwolf-like Cursed Sleep.

After a bit of a mid-section sag, the album really hits its stride again with the earthily rhythmic Seedling. The track which follows, Then The Letting Go is utterly exquisite, with McCarthy's vocal responses soaring like Sandy Denny's in The Battle of Evermore.

Perhaps the most accessible Bonnie Prince Billy album so far, The Letting Go will bewitch both old and new enthusiasts of Will Oldham's beguiling and inexplicable talent.

as published at subba-cultcha.com

it's really good, actually
don't know what all you naysayers are going on about. It might even be my favourite Will Oldham album - yes, including There Is A Darkness. Deffo the best thing he's done since then, at any rate. Having read reviews I was expecting the backing vocals to drown out everything, but they are well-placed in the mix throughout. Aren't they? Well, I like it.

Not the Masterpiece It So Wants to Be
All the stars seem to perfectly align on "Cursed Sleep" and unfortunately nothing else on The Letting Go comes close to matching the lush, epic, crescendo arrangement and complementary, "just so" harmony of Dawn McCarthy on that single. The song is flawlessly mixed and balanced; in most of the other tracks, McCarthy is more pronounced and the result is more of a distraction, akin to dumping a boulder, from space, in a glassy, rural lake: it breaks you out of your spell. Overall, producer Valgeir Sigurosson did an impressive job to combine the rustic with symphonic, but perhaps Bonnie `Prince' Billie might want to consider the more consistent, and ethereal, Nigel Godrich (Blur, Beck, Elbow) for his next album.