NEW ALBUMS
Guitar and vox lycanthropes go forth and multiply, to febrile effect. Lambs are wooed, lawns set alight. Stay on the road, says Ben Thompson. Illustration by The Red Dress.
Matt Sweeney and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s lupine interludes, plus The Coral, Nick Cave, Field Music and more.
“Sweeney’s vibe is very much John Renbourn plays Joseph Spence here.”
ASENSE OF drama seems to be one of the defining characteristics of Superwolf/ Superwolves music, both in writing and performance. How and when the pre-conditions for that drama are fulfilled, and whether the phase of the moon has a place in them, only Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham (Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy in his workclothes, or on his workhorse) seem to know. But the union which coalesced so effectively between three songs played for the first time on a figurative high wire at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire in 2003, and a Saturday night headlining set at the Green Man festival in August 2005, has reconvened 16 years later with its musical and lyrical potency miraculously intact.
“When I come to your streets, make worry for me,” is the lethal injunction of an opening track which seethes with menace and libidinal energy. It’s a vintage piece of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy ambiguity, as the archaic directness of that formulation leaves you in a moment’s doubt as to which of the protagonist or the antagonist really has the most to be concerned about, before the rest of the song resolves that uncertainty through the erection of a transparent fourth wall. “I build worlds in the sky/I’ve got blood in my eyes/I’ve got melody on my mind,” the singer proclaims, making the transition from Oppenheimer to Bacharach in three simple steps. His climactic insistence that “I’ve got monsters inside me that must be born” is backed up by a blazing guitar break from Sweeney, setting fire to the barn in which that unearthly nativity has taken place.
Make Worry For Me is a classic “Here’s Johnny” moment (in a The Shining sense rather than the Johnny Carson original greeting, with Matt Sweeney’s axe-work every bit as devastating as Jack Nicholson’s was in Stanley Kubrick’s movie), as the exact nature of the neighbourhood threat
Superwolves poses is laid out. If these canines moved in next to you, your lawn would die. But this album is not all Sturm und
Drang, and the next two songs celebrate the tender licks of the lair, albeit with a tongue that rasps. Good To My Girls is not just the anodyne celebration of the joys of family life that its title suggests, but instead posits parenthood as a cover story for adult failings (“We all have ways to make it seem we are not hard or bad”) and a don’t-read-thesmall-print insurance policy against mortality. That metaphysical theme –
“I fear the fact that after life complete emptiness swirls” – carries over into the next song, God Is Waiting, whose courtly meditation on the ageing process sets the listener up for an almost self-parodic Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy lyrical mike drop, “God can fuck herself and does – hardcore!”
Matt Sweeney’s commitment to supply Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy with “guitar parts that hold his voice like a chalice holds wine’” is fully delivered upon here. And one of the two main joys of Superwolves is hearing Sweeney get to run the full gamut of his formidable arranger/accompanist repertoire in the interests of that act of communion. The former Chavez guitarist has played with (among others) Adele, Johnny Cash, Run The Jewels, Neil Diamond, the Dixie Chicks and Tinariwen (not to mention Billy Corgan), and this collaboration offers him a rare opportunity to push all those envelopes at once.
Hall Of Death brings in Tuareg back-up with a lovely loping guitar riff contributed by Ahmoudou Madassane, rhythm guitarist with Mdou Moctar’s band, and freewheeling support from the rest of his band. If you’ve ever wondered what the second Meat Puppets album might have sounded like had it been recorded in the African desert, this song has your answer. And if this exhilarating plateau necessarily marks the high point of the album, the descent to the coastal plain of the last few tracks is anything but vertiginous.
Shorty’s Ark is an uncharacteristically sentimental animal listsong which somehow steers clear of the icky territory Donovan or John Martyn might have taken it in their early career determination to keep their dark sides in check. I Am A Youth Inclined To Ramble is a splendid, more or less straight (and none the worse for that) version of an Irish folk standard which Paul Brady previously made his own. Sweeney’s vibe is very much John Renbourn plays Joseph Spence here, which is great news, as that’s one of the best vibes there is.
Alongside Sweeney’s freedom to roam, the other main joy of
Superwolves is hearing Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy needing to rise to the occasion. He’s spoken of the first Superwolf record giving him the confidence to approach subject matter he would feel “hesitant or intimidated about addressing lyrically if I was working on my own – because Matt’s there too, I can be vulnerable in certain ways that I can’t be normally.” And Superwolves offers supporting evidence for this proposition in both the unabashedly autobiographical feel of My Popsicle (“Times Square once was dark and wild and frightening to a guileless child”) and the chaste, blasted mood of My Body Is My Own.
I don’t agree with the YouTube commenter who observed regretfully of one of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s larky recent lockdown outings with old sparring partner Bill Callahan (Young to his Dylan, or is it the other way round? I can never remember) that “the faerie of genius has long since left his shoulder”. But there have undeniably been points in the long interval between his and Sweeney’s two lupine excursions when the variety of elaborate ruses Will Oldham has come up with to keep his creativity fresh have threatened to become (to misappropriate the words of John Updike) the mask that eats the face. Superwolves – like the best of the Bill and Billy songcycle – suggests that, far from going on hunger-strike to protest the non-availability of organic food in prison, the Shaman of alt country might still have it in him to found a new republic in the ruins of Capitol Hill.