APOCALYPSE NOW Bill Callhan
May 09, 2011
The Artist Formerly Known As Smog strips things back and finally paints his masterpiece.
BY JOHN SCHACHT
An editor I wrote for years ago told me he didn't like Bill Callahan because
he thought he was "trying too hard to sound like somebody else." I nearly
scratched my head bloody over that one because, love Callahan or hate him, it'd
be difficult to find a more idiosyncratic musician since he began releasing
music two decades ago.
With such a distinctive voice - lyrically and literally with that sonorous tuba-fone - change in Callahan's music tends to be incremental: subtle shifts in instrumentation, arrangements and tempos nudge in new directions narratives that always root around in the most vulnerable corners of the human psyche. On 2007's Woke On a Whaleheart, his first after dropping the Smog/(Smog) appellation and moving to Austin, Texas, Callahan expanded his songwriting palette of loping gaits, twangy shuffles, chugging rockers and creaky piano ballads with accents of gospel choruses and call-and-response blues. On 2009's Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, he added sweeping orchestral strings and horns, hinting at gothic country while sidestepping its tropes.
On his latest for venerable label Drag City, the 7-song, 40-minute Apocalypse, Callahan strips away those elements and relies on one or two accents per song - a Wurlitzer or a whistle; a fiddle, flute, or feedback - to make this record feel as barren as the Texas brushlands. Love in its various gray shades is Callahan's narrative stock-in-trade, but on Apocalypse he's just as often wrestling with the ups and downs of the thought process going on underneath, and the anthropomorphic imagery that he's so partial to lines up with the music here in evocative unison. He supplies what almost amounts to a Rosetta stone on "Universal Applicant," where flute and syncopated chords wind around a bass line and snare-shuffle like a caduceus while Callahan sings, "Without work's calving increments/Or love's coltish punch/What would I be?/An animal-less isthmus beyond the sea."
This metaphor-music nexus is most notable on the stunning opener "Drover." Ranking among Callahan's finest songs, this gorgeous 6/8 canter builds to a strummed crescendo where fiddle and feedback blow through like tumbleweeds. The writer who once declared "I break horses" tries here to corral his self-consciousness, and eventually gives in - with liberating relief -- to the same untamed logic that typifies the land: "One thing about this wild, wild country/It takes a strong, strong it breaks a strong, strong mind."
Callahan goes from fauna to flora and drover to gardener on "Baby's Breath," contrasting the wildflower associated with everlasting love and innocence with its eventual turn to hay as he bemoans a lost love. Here the feedback threatens to overwhelm the finger-picked acoustic and shuffling beat - an echo of the narrative contrast - as he concedes that "you must reap what you sow/or sing." That topic is also handled beautifully in ballad form on "Riding for the Feeling," warm Wurlitzer and guitar curlicues circling each other and the brushed percussion like first-blush lovers before the eventual break-up "apocalypse." Callahan is looking back wistfully on the intense connectivity of relationships -- "It's never easy to say goodbye/To the faces/So rarely do we see another one/So close and so long" - but with the song title serving as a mantra, he vows to enjoy the ride while it's happening.
By the graceful closing track "One Fine Morning" (at nearly nine minutes, the record's longest), Callahan has pulled off the neat trick of reversing the order of things - both musically and lyrically -- from opening track "Drover." Over a slowly strummed acoustic and some of the most elegiac C&W piano chords you'll ever hear (courtesy of Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg), Callahan now seems to be inviting the listener to join him in "my apocalypse." Only here it suggests the nuking (if you will) of all the wasted time and energy spent spinning in the self-conscious circles that keep us from the surrounding natural wonder we are part of. Callahan sings of the scales (or veils) falling from his eyes as the "curtain rose and burned in the morning sun/And the mountains bowed down like a ballet/Like a ballet of the heart," then declares in his deepest baritone, "Hey! No more drovering!/No more drovering!/When the earth turns cold and the earth turns black/Will I feel you riding on my back?"
Callahan's wit is nearly as arid as the Texas territory, and the song ends with him intoning "DC450" - the record's Drag City catalog number - to tie a light-hearted bow on things. That crooked sense of humor fuels the chugging, guitar-fuzz rocker "America," too, but it's arguably the disc's one sore thumb. It's an ambiguous paean to his homeland, bemoaning its history of needless wars and historical amnesia while praising what he sees as its real warriors and truth tellers, "Captain Kristofferson!/Buck Sergeant Newbury!/Leatherneck Jones!/Sergeant Cash!"
Callahan may not believe his work belongs in their company - "I never served my country," he sings right after listing that roster - but Apocalypse, Callahan's 14th full-length, suggests he will eventually wind up among those equally unique American musical treasures.
[Photo Credit: Kirstie Stanley]
Bill Callahan is currently on tour in the U.K. and Europe. His U.S. tour starts June 14 - full itinerary here.
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