A Week With Bonnie Prince Billy's "Lie Down In The Light": Day 5
20 November 2008
tell your friends...
Words by Joel Minor // Illustration by Sonia Kreitzer
The surprise of Lie Down’s release and the lack of advance copies is probably what delayed its appearance on the Metacritic website, where they aggregate reviews of new releases and assign scores so they can average them out. Since many reviews do not contain ratings, the scores the Metacritic masters assign can be arbitrary, but there is almost complete consensus among the thirteen reviewers that Lie Down is a career highlight. One common appeal for many of the reviewers is Bonny Billy’s voice, showing a range, experimenting, emoting either like he hasn’t in years or like he never has before.
Most of his albums, a close listener can detect singing style distinctions between them, but I agree, the subtleties in his singing on Lie Down is remarkable—there’s not an ounce of burnout or boredom to it, something you might expect from someone doing this for over 15 years now. Probably comes from continued confidence in the material he has written, but also in the musicians and technicians he pulls together, each time some new, some familiar, but always seeming to sense the set spirit and to play off it.
Part of what drew me so close to Palace was the sad plodding of it all, the ramshackle marches, and I think that’s what draws me to “What’s Missing Is,” although it’s also the harmonies. It’s not only musicians and producers, engineers, whatnot, he’s successfully pulled together from the beginning, but harmonizers too, and as spine-tingling as his singing can be by himself, with the right voice or voices behind, even higher bells are ringing. I won’t even start to mention examples, because it would be too hard to stop.
For the first two verses, over the slow, pendulum guitar strums, Bonny’s and Ashley’s voices oscillate between tender (sensitive) highs and tender (gentle) lows. Banjo, shruti box and a row of wrenches shamble in and out, until the crescendo of the third verse, bringing missing and plenty together under the lyrics’ ode to rhythm and harmony themselves. Like the best of Palace’s songs, one feels like one is listening in on the very moment of creative coagulation, so innocent, driven and tentative.
What’s missing in “What’s Missing Is” are pronouns, though it feels no less universally personal than, say, “Missing One,” and seasoned with symbolism, still suggests a story. Starting with the comforting, giving qualities that are missing, then realizing the plenty in God and speaking, singing and breathing, resulting in accepting one has to miss to have, in sailing on with shared love and physical affection.
“Always Bathing in the Evening” immediately came to mind as a partner to “Missing Is,” with its similarly pronoun-less, even more minimalist structure. Almost exclusively action verbs, we picture friends jumping and playing in a river or swimming hole, celebrating at a party or watering hole, and concluding in bed, all connected seamlessly and sung delicately. “Goat and Ram,” another contender with (mostly) delicate singing and (mostly) quiet, secretive style, contains the one God and lovers’ bodies, the walking in time together without children.
I’m also attracted to “We All, Us Three, Will Ride” here, especially the 2002 7” version with the slower tempo and the harmonies. Sung from the woman’s perspective, injured physically and perhaps emotionally, reflecting on the empty baby room and crib, waiting for her lover to come and make two three, so to all ride through the hills and trees, past the animals. That’s what I make of it, anyway, today, like with “What’s Missing Is” and the others, the story secondary to the vocables.
What Bonny song goes better into the rhythms of recurrence, though, than “At the Break of Day”? The joining and leaving, the dawn and evening, the drinking, dancing, love making, sleeping, departing, waking and missing—cycle of sorrow and joy, ease and pain, that cannot be broken even through sharing and owning, belonging and abandoning. And what memorable chorus, with Pajo breathily, lowly, feeding the first words of each daring, uncaring line. Like the many things missing helping make the rhythm, the opposites are enacted in order to form complete action and emotion before the next occurrence comes round.
Opposite in title and delivery, at least, to “What’s Missing Is,” comes “So Everyone,” on the surface a lusty ode to oral and public sex between kismet-struck strangers or reunited lovers. The soulful, plangent voice of the mountain girl trades verses with the boisterous and declarative voice of the boy lit by the moon, and they join in revelry, so simply and beautifully stated—o take it, o take me, o make it o make me—it’s a wonder such a chorus had not existed already. Those few words together, sway joyfully back and forth between, order and plea, offer and agree. In so doing, selfishly gives way to equally.
We could take, could make this song as nothing less than the coupling of the heavens and earth, with the boy circling the world like the sun or the moon, indeed lit by the moon itself, and the girl of the mountain looking out from her high, axial, central point, holding magic for the right traveler, the right enlightened seeker. The new leaf—fertility, renewal—that they show the world together was won by betting on black—non-manifest, chaos, space—and even—balance, stability, reflection.
As for everyone seeing this loving copulation, it’s as if just to witness, what love two good, free entities can produce together. It’s a fun and edgy element to the song, but doesn’t strike me as exhibitionist or sleazy. It’s a common element to the album: the man, woman and everything else; the every man who will last; the everything that ever was or will be; the knew everything once; the everybody says that it’s alright; the for every man alive. This is an album with sweeping, all-inclusive aspirations.
It’s also an album with almost no drums, save for bongos and scattered percussion, but one hardly notices, even on rowdy songs like “So Everyone,” with the hard, percussive strums of the acoustic guitar marching confidently along the whole way, and the voices gathering for the chorus, the organ, trombone and electric guitar dancing around in ecstasy.
There are many strong nominations to couple with “So Everyone,” too, so to name a few: “Marriage” and “King Me” with their oral sex insinuations and clearing the streets for us, watch our friends wander through; “Nomadic Revery” with its going around your every curve and all the city’s on me, wish to scold me, lay their hands upon me; and most obviously, “The Mountain Low,” with the woman in the valley he wants to fuck and the friend whom he waits on for advice, presumably about her.
But the winner for me is another Viva Last Blues track, “Work Hard, Play Hard,” and a fellow unruly rocker, with Bonny belting out full-force about the troubadour and the woman he travels with, couples with, at the start and end of the day. The skins and traps are heavy in this song, but the acoustic and electric guitar in both songs work similarly: the acoustic the steady, rotating wheels and the electric the humming, revving engine, carrying the freedom- and fun-loving mates across the eyes of the world.
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