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**Palace Brothers - There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You**
★★★★☆

In the grand tradition of American music's most beautifully broken souls, Will Oldham emerged from Louisville, Kentucky in the early '90s like some spectral figure conjured from the hollers and honky-tonks of a half-remembered past. His 1993 debut under the Palace Brothers moniker, "There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You," arrived with all the fanfare of a whispered confession in an empty church, yet it would prove to be one of the decade's most quietly revolutionary statements.

The album's genesis can be traced to Oldham's post-college wanderings and his brief stint as an actor in indie films, most notably Mateo Gil's "The Good Life." But it was his musical awakening that truly mattered – a stark revelation that traditional song structures could be dismantled and rebuilt as vehicles for existential dread and rural mysticism. Working with producer and fellow traveller Brian McMahan (of Slint fame), Oldham crafted something that felt both ancient and startlingly modern, as if Hank Williams had been resurrected to soundtrack the apocalypse.

The musical landscape Oldham inhabits here defies easy categorisation, though "alt-country" became the lazy shorthand. This is folk music in its most primal sense – not the sanitised coffeehouse variety, but something that crawls up from the earth itself. His voice, a reedy instrument capable of both vulnerability and menace, navigates melodies that seem to exist in a state of perpetual collapse. The arrangements are deliberately sparse, built around acoustic guitars that sound like they're held together with prayer and spite, occasional flourishes of electric guitar that cut through the mix like lightning, and rhythms that stumble forward with the gait of a man walking home drunk through unfamiliar woods.

"Ohio River Boat Song" serves as the album's centrepiece, a haunting meditation on mortality that unfolds like a fever dream. Oldham's vocals drift over a hypnotic guitar pattern while he spins tales of death and transcendence with the matter-of-fact delivery of someone reading obituaries. It's here that his genius becomes apparent – the ability to make the profound seem casual and the casual seem profound. "Riding" follows similar territory but with added urgency, its galloping rhythm suggesting both escape and pursuit, while Oldham's lyrics paint pictures of landscapes both internal and external.

The opening track, "Ohio River Boat Song (I'll Be Here in the Morning)," immediately establishes the album's preoccupations with transience and spiritual reckoning. Meanwhile, "You Will Miss Me When I Burn" builds to something approaching catharsis, its repeated mantra delivered with increasing intensity until it becomes both threat and promise. These aren't songs in any conventional sense – they're incantations, secular hymns for the spiritually dispossessed.

What makes this album remarkable is its complete commitment to its own strange logic. Oldham never panders or explains; he simply presents his vision of American gothic with unwavering conviction. The production, deliberately lo-fi even by early '90s indie standards, serves the material perfectly, creating an intimate atmosphere that makes the listener feel like an eavesdropper on private moments of crisis and revelation.

The album's influence has proven far more substantial than its initial sales figures suggested. It essentially created a template for what would become known as the "New Weird America" movement, inspiring everyone from Devendra Banhart to Fleet Foxes to approach folk music as something living and mutable rather than a museum piece. Oldham himself would continue exploring this territory across dozens of releases under various Palace configurations, but he never again captured quite the same sense of discovery that permeates this debut.

Today, "There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You" stands as a masterclass in artistic vision realised without compromise. It's an album that rewards patience and punishes casual listening, revealing new depths with each encounter. In an era of increasingly polished and focus-grouped music, it remains a testament to the power of unvarnished expression and the enduring appeal of beautiful, broken things. Like all great art, it doesn't comfort so much as it confronts, leaving listeners changed rather than merely entertained.