Low key, shambolic and with a detectable air of mischief, Will Oldham's entrance was exactly like his music. Under the latest in a long line of trading monikers, Bonnie "Prince" Billy's first few minutes on the Whelan's stage were divided between languid conversation with his band and an apathetic approach towards tuning. "The curtain isn't up yet," he chided a stray heckler in the hushed crowd. It was indeed curtains for slick orchestration and undemanding lyrics, as the Kentucky native shuffled into his trademark mangled country ballads. If Will Oldham is an acquired taste, it was a gathering of connoisseurs. Amplifiers perched on bar stools and beer crates to rasp out songs of love, despair and murder while an atonal fiddle weaved through the melancholy of diffidently picked guitars.
Grimacing through his bushy beard, Oldham performed a set that leant heavily on his recent albums, while occasionally detouring through an expansive back catalogue. A King At Night crept out delicately, its deadpan humour finding an appreciative audience. Morose and jocose, like a shrill-voiced Leonard Cohen, Oldham slayed them with the slalom-pole love song, At Break of Day. A clear indication that Oldham enjoys character acting, the tender and delicate ballad gleefully shifted gear when it hit a dark twist. Role-playing was strangely suspended, however, when Oldham introduced the desolate Grand Dark Feeling of Emptiness as "the only true song of the evening". A muted wail of plaintive lyrics against a sparse melody, it drew to an unresolved finish as though to say, "and you thought you had problems". Positively energetic by comparison, The Sun Highlights the Lack in Each, a woozy Drinking Woman and the conspiratorial Death to Everyone got pulses at least hobbling, before the austere beauty of I See a Darkness brought the catharsis to a close.
