Beware is Billy’s grandest sounding record yet, but don’t let that wrongfoot you. His songs thrive on an innate and unnerving tension. The instrumentation – warm fiddle and pedal steel, acoustic and electric guitars, communal co-ed backing vocals – gives the impression of rustic hearth and home, crackling fires and woven throws draped over ratty but comfortable sofas, a scruffy mutt dozing on the floor. But, um, beware, there are loaded guns planted all over the place. Billy’s deceptively conciliatory tones betray dark barbs, graveyard jokes and old grudges. It’s most disconcerting. The listener throws the record on and kicks back with boots unlaced, only to scan the wry, recriminatory and bible black titles: ‘Beware Your Only Friend’, ‘You Can’t Hurt Me Now’, ‘You Are Lost’, ‘You Don’t Love Me’, ‘I Don’t Belong To Anyone’, ‘Death Final’… This man is the master of the backhanded endearment and the prettily veiled threat. Imagine the Neil Young of Harvest Moon channeling the demons of Tonight’s The Night, halfway between the Stray Gators and Charlie Manson. Here are songs of country gentlemen, reluctant suitors and the bourgeois brutes of old murder ballads like ‘The Banks Of The Ohio’, masking their psychopathic tendencies behind courtly manners.
Beware is a beauty. Throughout, Billy sings as well as eats his heart out, and the cast of players (too numerous to mention) cover themselves in quiet glory. Just don’t take this record to bed. It might stab you in the night.

Key Track: ‘Heart’s Arms’