Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - 'Cursed Sleep' (Domino) Released 24/07/06

Melancholy strings to the fore, 'Cursed Sleep' drifts off the starting block like a close relative of Nick Drake's 'Bryter Layter'. Being from the increasingly sharp pen of the grandmaster of gloom, however, the Tamworth bard's favoured mood of bucolic calm soon takes a turn towards more unsettling regions, as Will Oldham (aka Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Palace and a zillion other aliases) finds himself unable to stir awake from a dream he'd have preferred not to have viewed in the first place, the dramatic stabs of the string section and Emmett Kelly's magnificent barbed-wire guitar licks accentuating the growing sense of claustrophobic unease. Following the wonderful collaboration with alt. rock factotum Matt Sweeney on last year's stark 'Superwolf' LP, this elegantly orchestrated first taster from the upcoming album 'The Letting Go' sees Oldham, in finer voice here than ever, inch ever closer to genuine songwriting genius from his humble beginnings of hard-going alt. country miserabilia. A vintage folk-flavoured spell well worth falling under.