Will Oldham - Guarapero: Lost Blues 2

7.5 - USA - 2000

The Palace rarities and singles comp Lost Blues & Other Songs acted as a kind of best-of for Will Oldham’s early work under the Palace pseudonyms. Non-album tracks like “Ohio River Boat Song”, “Horses”, and “West Palm Beach” are some of his “greatest hits” despite their relative unavailability in their original forms, and so their collection on an easily available single disc is a boon to fans in much the same way as Stereolab’s Switched On series (and o! how we wait in vain for Switched On Vol. 4).

Guarapero: Lost Blues 2 continues the project of collecting various Oldham rarities and even though the release is credited, unusually, to Will Oldham himself rather than some pseudonymic mask, much of the material here is from the same Palace period as its predecessor. But, again, whereas Lost Blues 1 is a kind of “greatest hits”, Guarapero is more like a “bootleg series” that rescues various stray recordings that had slipped into the cracks of Oldham’s rather knotty discography.

Due to the wide range of material culled from seven years of recording, this set can be at times rather disjointed, and if Palace/Oldham’s more well-known work is already rather lo-fi, the tracks here are even more raw and scratchy. As such, Guarapero is most certainly not for those not already familiar and down with Oldham’s rather rough aesthetic, but fans and completists fill find much of value here.

A rundown: the compilation opens appropriately enough with “Drinking Woman”, the sombre b-side to the first Palace single “Ohio River Boat Song”. The cheeky Phil Ochs tribute “Gezundheit” and the harrowing “Let The Wires Ring” are among the most lo-fi recordings in Oldham’s canon. The former was originally released as an insert with a German music magazine (and despite its ultra-obscurity, it managed to ascend to the status of fan favourite). “Let The Wires Ring”, sort of an Appalachian folk-punk “Turn The Page”, features some of Oldham’s best vocal yelping.

Two tracks are taken from a full-band live performance recording in 1994 and are a clear contrast with the generally more sparse recordings that dominate the rest of the collection. Unfortunately despite the fine performances by the band (and Oldham’s vocals on “Stable Will” are very powerful indeed), the recording quality makes them suffer (the lo-fi aesthetic works much better on the more acoustic numbers). Elsewhere, there are a couple of bizarre covers of AC/DC’s “Big Balls” and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Every Mother’s Son” and some unusual electronic experiments. One of those is a reading of D.H. Lawrence’s “The Risen Lord” over a clunky drum machine, but the other is an unreleased single version of Arise, Therefore’s “You Have Cum In Your Hair And Your Dick Is Hanging Out” with the slightly less off-putting title “Boy, Have You Cum”. It’s a very pretty song, and the slightly more up-beat arrangement improves on the album version (indeed, it’s such a lovely song, that, without seeing the title, you’d never guess it’s ostensibly about premature ejaculation: "She won't come / I'll be gone").

The concluding tracks are drawn from a later period when Palace was transitioning to Bonnie “Prince” Billy (a brief period when Oldham was inclined to issue recordings under his own name) and therefore represent a more mature version of the Palace sound. Both sides of the acoustic single “Patience” are included, the b-side “Take How Ever Long You Want” slightly outshines its somewhat duller a-side. Most interesting of all, however, are two tracks taken from the Guarapero sessions that give the compilation its title. Recorded by Steve Albini with a full-band (including an accordion that gives the songs a bit of a zydeco flavour), “Sugarcane Juice Drinker” and the wonderful “Call Me A Liar” are conspicuous in their production quality and probably the tracks with the most universal appeal here. But of course that would miss the point of the compilation; in the end, the greatest strength of Guarapero: Lost Blues 2 is how its eclectic and challenging nature makes it an interesting, if not compelling, encapsulation of Will Oldham’s early career. Lost Blues will convert you; Lost Blues 2 justifies the conversion.

(A third installment in the series, Little Lost Blues, covered material from the early Bonnie "Prince" Billy period, including such fantastic non-album tracks as "Southside Of The World" and "I Confess" and is more like the the first volume in its accessibility. Alas, Little Lost Blues was offered only as a limited edition inclusion with the 2006 album The Letting Go and is rather hard to get a hold of (which sort of misses the point of these compilations)).