Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – Lay & Love (Domino)
4/5
By: Charlie Potter
I can't keep up with this bonnie wee lad. He seems to just release music all the time, and from every direction.
If you have arrived at the music of Bonnie 'Prince' Billy from a singer-songwriter angle, then you may dismiss 'Lay & Love' as being much too simple and more importantly nothing new. If so I say to you then that you are looking too hard, squire. You need to relax and realise that Mr. Oldham is in control - it's not supposed to be particularly clever. The point is that the song is played and sung with an incredible amount of sensitivity, which is a skill that not all have, and of those that do possess it, most squander it and hardly any match that of Will Oldham.
The lyrics seem at first to be quite simply about a girl he likes, but as always, he seems to get at something much more particular and harder to describe. This is articulated in such a way that you feel drawn to recognising this very particular feeling he's putting across, and the track is all the more satisfying and individual for it.
The track is comprised of two guitars, two vocalists (one male and one female) and, best of all, a pitched down drum machine. Lovely - the gentle picking of the guitars puts you in mind of Joni Mitchell, and it's a sound that grows delightfully throughout the song and leads you from start to finish without a gap. There is a reverb on everything that sounds as if it could be entirely room ambiance, which flawlessly allows you imagine the song in a nice, warm place.
But yes, the female vocalist does occasionally sound like Dido.
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