The Letting Go
Having long recorded as Palace Music or Palace, the enigmatic, elusive Bonnie "Prince" Billy continues to confound musical expectations.  His latest may well be his loveliest, a series of meditations and tone poems on love and mortality, with the autumnal strains of a chamber quartet and the vocal counterpoint of Dawn McCarthy supporting Billy's tremulous expression of his surreal, stream-of-consciousness lyricism.  Results range from the dreamy, bluesy "Cursed Sleep" and the evocation of a British madrigal on "No Bad News" to the discordant propulsion of "The Seedling" and the call and response of the folkish "Then the Letting Go." It all fits together in a manner that defies categorization and dares the listener to resist its aural seduction.--Don McLeese