Will Oldham: Ode Music

Will Oldham has never been afraid to throw his audience off balance, changing his musical style (campfire ballads, rock songs, drum-machine-enhanced dirges) as often as he changes his moniker (Will Oldham, Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Bonnie 'Prince' Billie, and so on). That artistic and commercial risk-taking has yielded some stunning results: His self-titled 1994 album as Palace Brothers (a.k.a. Days In The Wake) is one of the past decade's most intimate pieces of raw, shattering beauty, in part because it sounds so fearlessly exposed. Of course, he's also unleashed misfires and experiments that don't add up to much, and most of Oldham's fans know to hesitate before blindly tackling his rapidly expanding catalog. The new Ode Music, the first of three planned Oldham releases in 2000, is about as far from vital as he gets, piecing together 33 minutes of pleasant, occasionally hypnotic, oddly repetitive instrumentals—or, as they're dubbed on the back cover, "silent music"—drawn from the score for a short film called Ode. At first, the album feels like a bad joke: His cracked, weary vocals, like them or not, are Oldham's most recognizable feature, and removing them would seem to defeat the purpose of his making a record at all. But in its subtly unsettling, resolutely minor way, Ode Music grows on you in a hurry, especially as the odes themselves (particularly "Ode #3" and "Ode #4") grow more compelling. It's best to think of it as a between-albums EP, especially considering that five of its ten tracks reprise earlier pieces, but it does an intriguing job brightening a corner of a complex and exciting musical mind.