By Jesse Cataldo

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy – The Letting Go – Drag City ****

While it may seem insulting to point out, there’s very little difference between a good Will Oldham album and a bad one. Oldham’s songs are such small, simple things that the separation between the two is as slight as the right balance between his off-kilter personality and tuneful sensibility. In this vein, his last two albums, The Brave and the Bold (with Tortoise) and Superwolf (with Matt Sweeney), were small failures, falling too far on the side of laziness or self-aware eccentricity to be fully enjoyable. The Letting Go, on the other hand, is a success of the same size, far from significant, yet enjoyable in a small, satisfying fashion.

J Dilla – The Shining – Bbe Records **

Released roughly six months after J Dilla’s premature death, The Shining ends up broaching the border between a proper album and a hastily cobbled-together “tribute.” Busta Rhymes’ explosively frenetic appearance on the opener “Geek Down,” backed by a droning mix of “Flight of the Bumblebee” and the theme from Jaws seems to promise a celebratory eulogy, but the results are far more bland. At best, The Shining could be considered hypnotic, with three or four revolving film samples and barely noticeable verses by contributors ranging from Black Thought (The Roots) to Common. At worst it’s a lackluster patchwork of discarded beats cannibalasticaly shoved together for some level of closure.

Cursive – Happy Hollow – Saddle Creek Records ***

There are few things more dangerous than the concept album, and Cursive’s incessant toying with the form on their last three albums seems to reveal some kind of subtle death wish. This desire seems to stem specifically from lead singer Tim Kasher, who’s not only playing Russian Roulette, but has loaded the gun with some of the most potentially disastrous bullets (divorce, the music business, the disappointments of middle age, respectively) imaginable. On Happy Hollow, Kasher broaches these disappointments in his usually high-flown style, while his band (now string-less with the departure of cellist Gretta Cohn) responds with furious torrents of sound unheard since Such Blinding Stars for Starving Eyes. The lyrics, portraying the collision of fairy-tale idealism with small-town mediocrity, tend towards clunkiness but are mostly functional, assuring that Kasher will live to tackle another potentially cliché issue sometime in the near future.

Matthew Friedberger – Holy Ghost Language School / Winter Women – 859 Recordings – **1/2

The solo debut from Matthew Friedberger (the male half of the increasingly ambitious Fiery Furnaces) arrives as exactly what you’d expect. Like much of his band’s work, this double concept album (two concepts, one per album) is exceedingly complicated. Beyond the distracting side story each album seeks to provide, a distinction also lies in the perceived difficulty of the two albums. Winter Women is the pop side, yet only exists as such by virtue of being placed next to Holy Ghost Language School. The good moments that are here, while relatively frequent, are crushed by the weight of the rest of the album’s pretensions. From the frequent spoken word pieces to the skittering, unsettling beats that work purposely against the song’s melodies, the sheer amount of lofty, unnecessary distractions almost makes you forget there are good songs down there in the first place.