Pond Scum

Pond Scum, Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s latest offering, excavates rare artifacts--performances occasionally eclipsing the original album tracks, especially given the vocal clarity to underscore Oldham’s lyrical virtuosity.

On Pond Scum, these songs seem to escape fully formed from Oldham's soul, even the no-frills cover of Prince's "The Cross," and if one has to take an educated guess about which Bonnie "Prince" Billy we get on this album, it's certain that what he has to say is well worth hearing.

The song selection, from two very distinct periods in Oldham’s discography, makes for a cohesive album, and it exemplifies how strong his songwriting has been from the beginning.

A masterful, mystical interpreter, Oldham conjures a new mood for Death To Everyone, unfurls an intense lost original called Beezle, and strikes at the gospel core of Prince’s The Cross.

Covering an eight-year span, they share a hushed and crackly intensity, often with little more than voice and acoustic guitar.

Though it offers only one "new" song, Pond Scum freshly adds (even more) depth to the Bonnie 'Prince' Billy cannon as if it were another studio album.

Pond Scum has enough variety to be pleasing to longtime fans and covers enough ground to be a great introduction to the man’s work for newcomers.

Oldham's rewriting of his own songs sometimes turns into a queasy compulsion.... There are some stunning revisions in this collection. [Mar 2016, p.62]

Pond Scum is an archive project, albeit one delivered with all the caginess we expect from this most capricious of singer-songwriters. [Apr 2016, p.90]

Fans of Oldham pre-BPB will be presented with a wealth of nuance and points of comparison, though first-time listeners would likely be alienated by its understated sound and self-referential motifs.

It’s heartening to hear, after all these years, that time has not diminished the intensity of those performances.

[Pond Scum may be] a fans-only album. And yet, taken on its own terms, Pond Scum is also a good-faith effort to plumb the nature of God. Not just any deity, but the distinctively American one born in 1741 in Jonathan Edwards’ hellfire sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and since then praised and perpetuated in countless old-time folk and gospel songs.

This is clearly for existing fans; those new to Oldham’s expansive, often confusing catalog are advised to start elsewhere. But if you are already converted to his stridently uncommercial musings, these once difficult to find performances make a wonderful addition to what is likely your already extensive Oldham collection.