Arise Therefore

Palace Music includes: Will Oldham (vocals); David Grubbs (piano); Ned Oldham (bass, background vocals).
Personnel: Ned Oldham (vocals, guitar); Will Oldham (vocals, electric guitar); David Grubbs (piano, organ); Maya Tone (drums, percussion).
Illustrator: Gene Booth.
A sticker appended to the packaging is the only thing identifying this as a Palace album. After this last official release by the "band," Will Oldham would become the solo artist he'd already been in everything but name. The mercurial songwriter/performer, fresh from the rocked-up triumph of VIVA LAST BLUES, reinvents himself yet again on ARISE. A uniformly placid sound is marked by the piano and organ of Gastr Del Sol's David Grubbs and a gloriously cheap-sounding drum machine that provides the only rhythm.
Most of the songs find Oldham in an unmerciful mode of self-examination, as he cast aspersions on his own life as well as the lives of others. What makes ARISE work is that Oldham is also at his most poetic here, in an almost traditional sense, with lyrics full of archaic imagery and language. The music is appropriately stately, achieving just the right mix of tradition and invention. ARISE THEREFORE sounds like nothing else, and succeeds on its own terms.