Orville Peck – the Promises of a Bez Valley Desperado

First let’s get the mask out of the way. Orville Peck always has it on – on stage, in public – and there’s scarcely an interview with him that doesn’t bring up why he so consistently wears the fringed accessory (see, we are even doing it here).

The mask, Peck told NPR, is more than fashion: “That’s kind of the irony of my mask… the idea that some people would have me being anonymous or hiding something or not being sincere. But it’s funny ‘cause the mask actually has allowed me to be the most vulnerable and the most sincere that I’ve ever been in my life.”

Which brings us to his backstory. Glorious as it is for an artist who filters outlaw country music through the slow-burn, moodiness of early Nineties British guitar music, dream pop, and even psychedelic rock, Orville Peck is a chosen name. But it is one that Peck inhabits so fully – from the imagery accompanying his latest album to the back-arched, fringe-flying, guitar-playing performance photos that stud his Instagram feed – that who he was before his 2019 debut, Pony, doesn’t really matter.

Except, of course, for those of us who have longed for a globally resonant South African artist, it matters in the music.

Listen to his 2022 album, Bronco, and the clues that Peck is South African are scattered around, like jacaranda blossoms cascading onto inky hot tar.

Here are the opening lines to Kalahari Down, a standout track on a standout record that is, hands down, our song of 2022 so far.

“I was born in the Badlands, honey
Strange place for a boy to drown
Spent my days on a mountain, baby
Twelve miles north of Sophiatown”

And, later, these lines – which also clearly signal why he was chosen to recreate Dolly Parton’s iconic 1997 Out magazine cover for its 30th anniversary this past July.

“Polishing your whip, never drove it far
Circling the veld, spitting in the jar
On your daddy’s farm, you’d say you’re afraid, tell me not to frown
Play a song, you’d dance around
Yippee-yo-ki-yay, we’d hit the ground
Still tumbling down”

The song nears perfection in its awakening of (doomed) first love. Between a boy and a boy. He’s swooning on the veld and he’s on the frontier of the taboo-breaking champions of Country music (Lil Nas X is the hitherto more gloried iconoclast), his smouldering, familiar melodies lush and lean at the same time, his channelling of Elvis knowing – but never ironic – skew and reverential, feverish but never fey. Peck’s comfort with the spangled camp of Country music provides the perfect vehicle to examine fully fledged masculinity in all its same-sex splendour, his gayness never a provocation, never a cause, never engineered to taunt the conservative hetero swagger of the music that till now dared not go into that queer night.

Supported by a warm guitar, subtle banjo and a trumpet that’s among the most emotional, and perfectly placed since