Blind Date Party CD

Birthed during the first phase of the Coronavirus pandemic, Bill Calaghan and Bonnie Prince Billy's collaborative double album, Blind Date Party, began with the pair challenging each other to record sparse, acoustic covers of a wide variety of songs. They then sent these recordings to a dizzying array of collaborators with no instructions, allowing these artists the opportunity to them shape them in any way they saw fit. The results are universally impressive, with the pair's emotive, country-tinged folk vocals riding above backing tracks that veer from atmospheric Americana and lo-fi rock, to wonky post-punk synth-pop, psychedelic dub-wise dream-pop and the kind of off-kilter folk-jazz that marked out Joni Mitchell's work in the early 1970s.