Will Oldham’s last several years have seen his already prolific pace increase drastically. The singer-songwriter best known as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy has, since 2008, released the unbelievably approachable Lie Down in the Light, a live album called Is It The Sea?, a full-blown country record called Beware and another live album, Funtown Comedown, as well as The Wonder Show of the World, credited to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and the Cairo Gang a.k.a. Emmett Kelly, who has been playing with Oldham for several years and on this album serves as collaborator. Unlike Beware, which was all about big, sometimes overblown, arrangements, The Wonder Show is a record of aching intimacy and proof that Oldham’s prolificacy is still largely working in his favor.

Oldham and Kelly’s collaboration is as much a record that examines the relationships of Oldham’s narrators and addressees as it is a record that explores the interplay between the two musicians. These songs privilege the two principal players, their guitars and the negative space between lines, between notes and the tension created by reducing everything surrounding them to the surroundings. Surprisingly, the record rarely sounds icy or austere, as so many records like this one do, and empty seconds on songs like “Teach Me To Bear You,” buffered by Kelly’s harmonies and the warmth in Oldham’s voice, instead subdue some of the eccentricities inherent in Oldham’s songs and his presentations. Rhythms are infrequent and guitar phrases are rarely hugely memorable or easily-dissected; each song, thus, becomes about voices, and this proves a far greater asset than it has any right to.

“With Cornstalks or Among Them” shows this at its most extreme. Over the course of three minutes, an electric guitar rings out and arpeggiates, but the only real melodies come from the two singers, who move in and out of harmony between sets of effects. Inexplicably, it never wears out its welcome, and moves into “The Sounds Are Always Begging,” a song about music and family presented as fairly straightforward folk, as Oldham moves through a vignette in which his wife destroys their bed, then roams around his house while he and children sing. “That’s What Our Love Is” moves along fairly well, but truly picks up, again, at the harmonies, highlighting Oldham’s raunchiest lyric in recent memory before hand percussion and acoustic guitars take over.

Though many of Oldham’s records function within a basic set of tropes: there are almost always acoustic and electric guitars, and words far stranger than their melodies let on being sung atop them: none ever quite sounds like anything that precedes it, and tracing the progress of his Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy material is far more difficult than it has any right to be. His work from record to record is so unpredictable, and his collaborators so frequently changing, that it’s almost as if his followups exist to thwart any writing about career arcs. All I am certain of is that I’m expecting another record in a year or so, and that his work, as always, rewards far more than it ought to.