Palace

The story comes full circle with this single, the last-ever official release under the venerable Palace catch-all. Originally recorded for a November 1993 BBC radio session, the backwoods shuffle "Little Blue Eyes" is a charmingly folksy and unpretentious return to the band's origins--after the extremes of the country-rock masterpiece Viva Last Blues and the beatbox fiasco Arise Therefore, it seems almost brand-new, just another natural evolution of Will Oldham's mercurial vision instead of a vintage leftover. For all of the obvious gothic influences implicit in Oldham's music, "Little Blue Eyes" and its B-side "" are perhaps the most traditional and rootsy entries in the Palace catalog--the vivid fiddling of one Henrique Prince lends the songs a distinctly Appalachian flavor seemingly transported wholesale from the acetate field recordings Oldham's spent a lifetime trying to recapture and reinvent. All told, a fitting epitaph. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide