The Brute Choir: Palace Music’s Viva Last Blues 30th anniversary

Through his songs, in his own unique way, Will Oldham has always lifted up the working-class and rightly presented them as life’s true champions. Under his fabled Bonnie “Prince” Billy moniker, this year’s The Purple Bird saw Oldham at his footloose-and-fancy-free best; the salt of the earth yet again the shining beacons throughout one of the year’s finest folk releases.

These foundations were laid many years before, and while there have been many vantage points to view the Will Oldham pantheon, perhaps the most prominent one is via the Louisville, Kentucky songwriter’s Palace Music cult classic, Viva Last Blues, which celebrates its thirtieth birthday today.

While Louisville was the nerve centre of post-hardcore – a scene boasting the likes of Slint, Rodan and later June of 44 – while Oldham was in and around this monumental period of the underground (that iconic cover art photo of Spiderland? Oldham took it), aesthetically, he sat on the fringes, instead anchored to earthy locality of his native Kentucky. Despite Oldham’s adventures which lead him to Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Bloomington, Indiana, his hometown remained a vital backdrop to his works.

Oldham’s songs still managed to intersect with post-hardcore. Take Slint’s Washer, which possessed just as much emotional clout and fragility as Oldham’s earliest works. Oldham’s presence was more immediate, though. Almost like he was playing his songs in your lounge room. His songs were thematically confronting, too. Take the hypnotic mood swing of Christmastime in the Mountains from the Palace Songs 1994 Hope EP. As Oldham sings, “I’m saving all my rage for you / We need an enemy”, so biting, yet delivered so gently and almost through tears, it felt like folk music harboured a new emotional power.

Bringing the Noise: Remembering Steve Albini

So too, You Will Miss Me When I Burn – the savage opening cut from Days in the Wake, released in the same year under the second of three Palace “offshoots” (this time Palace Brothers). To this date, Days in the Wake remains Oldham’s most stripped back release – a series of close-to-the-bone laments seemingly birthed from the corner of a decrepit outhouse.

Less than a year after its release, Oldham’s stock would rise to new levels with his third full-length album: Palace Music’s Viva Last Blues. A rampant, fully formed electric romp that took folk-rock to places it had not yet been in the ’90s. Led by Steve Albini’s unique recording ability to capture raw, primal energy in a room, Oldham drafted in his frequent collaborator and brother, Ned (bass and slide guitar) as well as Liam Hayes (piano, organ), Jason Loewenstein (drums) and Bryan Rich (lead guitar). Together, they produced something that still stands up today, sounding as if it were recorded just yesterday.

A giant leap from everything that Oldham produced in the preceding years, Viva Last Blues begins with More Brother Rides. A spit and sawdust blue-collar tale where the railroad and friends are the central point. Simpler times where work and play were all one needed, and amid a ramshackle of plinks and twangs that are just about held together by Hayes searching piano, thematically, it underpins much of Viva Last Blues. Later, Oldham follows the same lineage with Work Hard / Play Hard, which comes as advertised. “Don’t you know I work hard / Don’t you know that I play hard,” yelps Oldham, backed by the kind of gritty folk-laden blues that Bill Callahan and Chan Marshall would dominate in the later part of the decade.

Viva Ultra is like post-hardcore blues delivered in imaginative, off-kilter ways, as a story about two lovers from different sides of the tracks emerges (“She’s my lifeblood / She’s my secret sharer”). Oldham’s lyrical vignettes become sharper on The Brute Choir. “Take fear and call it lust,” he announces, tackling his fear as an artist with the kind of rambling tale that you’re likely to hear from a flawed genius three beers deep at the end of the bar (“Their voices bringing trees to their knees / With nothing to say when they’re speaking / They’re quiet, the choir, their voices go higher”).

The residue drips into The Mountain Low. Nomadic folk where Oldham humorously professes, “If I could fuck a mountain / Lord I’d fuck mountain / With a woman in the valley”. It’s one of those unfiltered observations littered throughout the folk broad church, but perhaps never done as brashly as this, emboldening a future generation to follow suite (most notably, Cass McCombs who through his song, Morning Star, ruminated about taking a shit in space).

Untethered from friends and family, on Tonight’s Decision (and Hereafter) the protagonist blows their life up through unspeakable actions even Oldham doesn’t reveal through the song, instead leaving us to form our own interpretations of the disaster. It’s the darkest moment on Viva Last Blues, and perhaps a path that, with the benefit of hindsight, would become prevalent in Oldham’s defining moment as a songwriter with Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s I See A Darkness (1999).

Sonically, New Partner doesn’t stray far from Tonight’s Decision (and Hereafter) – a love song that is all swoon and purr, the verses flowing like beer on tap. It’s the kind of moment that just drops into a songwriter’s lap, and (again with hindsight) the first thread to form the patchwork that Oldham would weave alongside Matt Sweeney with Superwolf (2005) and Superwolves (2021).

Following the buoyant wall of sound of Work Hard / Play Hard, Cat’s Blues is just as large-hearted. Albini really gets into his work from behind the consoles, harnessing the quiet / loud dynamics that he will eternally be the master of. And while the traces of Cat’s Blues are heard on We All, Us Three, Will Ride, there’s more of a campfire hiss, with an intimate tale where the emotional weight is captured just as much in Albini’s recording of Oldham’s performance than the song itself.

On closing track, Old Jerusalem as Oldham sings, “Trouble has caused me so much grief”, the story unfolds where one could perhaps draw a straight line to Tonight’s Decision (and Hereafter). It’s life on the fault lines, and while Oldham’s naked honesty has been imitated by so many since the recording of Viva Last Blues, one has to consider that short of Callahan, David Berman, Lou Barlow and maybe John Darnielle, sincerity through song was a rare commodity in 1995. Coupled with Albini’s unvarnished recordings, Oldham offered a boldness. Not only an unmooring of emotions through his songs but also delivering them with a spirit where the performances actually sounded like he meant it.

This is why Oldham has gone on to be of the most peerless songwriters of our time. His songs, often feeling like the first take because that’s where the honesty and true spirit is. And for many, Viva Last Blues was the first snapshot of an artist who has made this the focal point of his creative existence.

Viva Last Blues was released via Drag City / Domino Recording Co.