Bonnie Prince Billy is a shy man. He takes the stage in darkness, there is no introduction save for a yodeled, "okee dokke" and then suddenly you are traveling through time, you are rhythmically stomping on the oak-floored barn, there is a jangle in your tangle and nothing else matters except the call and response of Billy and his band. Will Oldham is part stringless puppet, part countrified leprechaun. His head swivels in time to the beating drums, arms pulled and swung in accordance with an invisible rhythm-master, all the while kicking and booming and crouching and hooting. He is a shape-shifter, a mountain goat posing as man.
Cheyenne Mize accompanies him on vocals and the "fiddle". She is a sweet apple pie filled with tabasco and strife; her country-hemmed dress hides the axe in her garter belt. She tangles with Oldham's torture, she delights in the epic peaks and tortured descents of love and life that Oldham effortless paints - in summing up the recent ending of a modern romance he laments, "I open this awful machine to nothing / where once your intimacies came pounding"
Christ, he's singing about when you don't fucking email, you asshole.
In "Strange Form of Life" Oldham and Mize climax together and apart - a boy and a girl sifting through space, loving each other and loving themselves, kissing in hopes of "forgetting the strange and the hard".
Last night in Harlem Will Oldham and his rollicking gang of strings and percussion reminded an astounded audience that jesus god, we're just blood and guts, alone and together, for better of worse. May it always be.
