The voice of Will Oldham on those earliest Palace releases has an equivalent sonic organicity, like piles of vegetable matter rotting on a compost heap. There is initially something disturbing in its feral rawness - it seems to allow us an unsettling glimpse of the eternality, the permanence, of things beyond their mundane (in a literal sense) appearance. It embodies a certain humanity, distinct from modern, moralistic reading of that word; a humanity beyond questions of good and evil, aware that both of these states contribute to the essence of an existence in thrall of nature.