Smog's Bill Callahan is, you see, a serial boyfriend, and the pattern is becoming dismally familiar. He meets a girl, falls in love, immediately gets dumped and then writes a song to assuage the mental torment. He's not joking. Barely raising his voice above a whisper, and scratching softly at his guitar, he recounts the manifold ways in which love has made a cruel mockery of his whole life.
It stared 'Back In School', where a drunken kiss resolutely failed to lead to a lifetime of married bliss, and has carried right through to the maturity of the present day. On this occasion, his girl has found a, ahem, 'New Best Friend'.
Looking like the sickly (or dead) brother of Thurston Moore, it's no surprise that banter is kept to a bare minimum, as Bill delivers his personal tragedies utterly straight. Introspective, inconsolable and thoroughly enjoyable. Obviously.
The reasons for Will Oldham's moodiness are not so readily discernable. Although an obsession with our four-legged friends is clearly high on the Palace singer's agenda. Why else would we be treated to a horse trilogy? Oldham croaks his way through the horse'n'incest world of 'Riding', scarily shouts out 'No More Workhorse Blues', before finally leaving the subject with an impassioned yelp of a song called simply 'Horses'.
What's more, it's difficult to know just how seriously to take a man who delivers his songs with a humourless joker's grin. Especially when his subject matter takes in the rather implausible account of him fighting in the streets ('A Sucker's Evening') and "fucking people up". Like the mystical musical bar inhabited soley by sharp-dressed losers with a terrifying capacity for whisky consumption, Palace's disquieting forays into semen-stained stables where they befriend small woodland animals are surely borne of the same romantic fiction.
Not that reality really matters, as Oldham finally staggers up Lovers Lane on the colossally wrenching 'New Partner', only to find that Bill Callahan's already used all the Kleenex. And so, with a whispered, "Oh fuck", he departs. Off for a game of Bukaroo, no doubt.