Why did Melt Banana, a local avant-punk band, open for Bonnie "Prince" Billy on his first-ever concert tour of Japan. Simple: Melt Banana like the music of Will Oldham, the man behind the moniker, and wanted to be part of his final show at O'Nest in Shibuya.
The match-up says something about Tokyo's indie-music scene, where so-called genre differences make no difference to people whose appreciation of music has more to do with energy and imagination than it does with style and image. Still, you would be hard put to find a more contrary combination: Melt Banana's music is angular, harsh and ear-splitting, while Oldham's is smooth, slow and often very quiet. The only thing they have in common is intensity.
Bonnie "Prince" Billy plays a timeless kind of American folk music, but it isn't pastiche. Oldham, who always uses a stage name, crept onto the indie scene in 1992 as the Palace Brothers with an album called "There Is No One What Will Take Care of You," which sounded like a field recording made during the Depression. The songs, almost all originals, were about sin and retribution, drunkenness and fornication. As the nascent alt-country movement gained momentum, Oldham continued to release records under the Palace Brothers umbrella (Palace Music or Palace Songs or just plain Palace) that gained in sonic fidelity but lost none of their chilling authenticity. Unlike the music of a lot of contemporaries who were also exploring more traditional styles of music, Oldham's songs were and still are felt rather than willed. He was often lumped in with alt-country or with anti-folk or with the purposely depressed style know as slowcore, but he didn't belong to any of them. His songs, especially the ones he's written since becoming Bonnie "Prince" Billy in 1999, are sui generis.