15. Days in the Wake (1994)

Oldham has said he doesn’t have Christian beliefs, but his relationship to religion is anything but simple. Within 7 minutes of “Days in the Wake,” Oldham sings “God is the answer” 9 times. Maybe it’s less about piety and more about a need to share his guilt (over sex? Over everything?) with someone who will listen.

For his second album, he’s still firmly stuck in the murk, as the listener’s invited to make sense of Oldham’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics, as vague here as ever before or since. The narrator kills a dog. Or maybe he is a dog? No, he’s a horse. But he’s making sounds like a sheep. On Days in the Wake, Oldham’s poetics are just as obscure as on his debut, but they lack the strong sensory evocations that made that album such a memorable piece of Appalachian folk art.

But there is one positive change between Oldham’s debut and his sophomore release: The guitar-playing. The amateurish chord mashing of There is No-One is traded in for intricate finger-picking and progressions that make Oldham sound like Elliott Smith had he split Portland for Kentucky, but kept the tape-hiss.