controlled and casual

this session from the previous lp and VERY good. pitchfork review i like of his new LP i posted a while ago. a reminder...this is a very good LP. A list of adjectives to describe Bill Callahan's writing and music is a list of contradictions. He's penetrating, he's ironic, he's intimate, he's elusive, he's distant and calcified, he's vulnerable and warm-- it's all there, album to album, song to song, and sometimes line to line. His voice is low and his songs are slow, so it's easy to mistake him for being sad. As a lyricist, he writes meticulously about distance: the distance between people and other people, and between people and themselves. He's a cartographer of broken roads. But more than sadness, his writing represents a stoic quest for understanding in the face of knowing that these gaps usually can't be filled. "There's no truth in you, there's no truth in me," he sang on 2003's Supper. "The truth is between." Apocalypse is his first studio album since 2009's Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. The contrast between the two is stark. Eagle was a bath of strings, open-air ambience, French horns, and soft, measured drums. It was delicate and planned, it called out warm. Lyrically, the songs were direct and steady admissions of the kinds of sentiments that rise to light after funerals and breakups-- an exercise in what we normally call "vulnerable." Apocalypse, ostensibly recorded live in the studio with a small band, is idiosyncratic and reluctant. Its narrators chew grass in silence and give you a too-long stare. They have meltdowns in foreign hotel rooms. And they come to us in a sound that is spare and liberated from Eagle's insistence on being gorgeous every single second. It's occasionally distorted, even ugly, a word I wouldn't use to describe almost anything Callahan's done since he recorded as Smog. One of his most remarkable tricks-- and one he returns to all over Apocalypse-- is the ability to sound both controlled and casual at the same time. The songs here are filled with silly, borderline bad ideas that an artist with less confidence might've scrubbed after taking a long walk and a good rest. "Baby's Breath" speeds up and slows down in a way that sounds unrehearsed, devolving into distorted guitar toward the end. The sloppy backing track on "America!" quotes what sounds like Civil War songs and 50s jungle-rock. (It also casts Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson as part of an imagined U.S. military force and ends on an acidic joke about American imperialism: "Well everyone's allowed a past they don't care to mention.") A few songs feature, prominently, the flute. But the feeling of spontaneity is also in Callahan's voice and delivery, which brings out the emotional dimension of the lines in ways the lyric sheet can't. On "One Fine Morning"-- one of two songs to use the album's title-- he sings, "It's all coming back to me now: my apocalypse, my apocalypse." The lyric is literally a realization, but it's the way he sings it that brings the feeling across: Curious and questioning, like he actually figured it out while tape was rolling. On "Universal Applicant", he describes a moment where he shoots a flare gun into the air, and punctuates it with a sound: fffff, pouh-- the flare burning and going off. The music falls silent for a few seconds. It's an aside that anchors the song. Ironically, it's not in the lyric sheet. All these apparent accidents and asides produce a strange effect: It's like Callahan is alive in the music while it's being documented. It's vital that way, but permeable, like a friend who can tell the same story over and over again with subtle variations and capture their audience each time. For me, Callahan's albums always return to questions of truth in song. For some people, the acoustic guitar-- when compared to the synthesizer-- is truth. For some, it's a line as unambiguous as "Most of my fantasies are of making someone else come," from 1997's Red Apple Falls. For others, it might be a line like "You always wanted to be the fire part of fire," from 2005's Woke on a Whaleheart-- a crowning example of Callahan at his most profoundly anti-poetic. He sets up alone and sings a lot of lines about feelings that start with the word "I" and doesn't use Auto-Tune, and so it's tempting to think of him as being a truth-teller. But it's more interesting-- and more flattering to him, I think-- to acknowledge the way in which he tries to climb to truth from so many different angles, where he finds footing and where he loses it, and the things he sees along the way. One of Apocalypse's prettiest and most agreeable songs is called "Riding For the Feeling". It's a slow waltz. Callahan strums an acoustic guitar and sings close to the mic. The drums are brushed and patient. The sound alone tells us it's honest. And yet the scenario presented in the song is so strange: Callahan singing about moving, leaving, disappearing. Callahan singing about being in a hotel room with the television on mute, listening to demo tapes: "My my my apocalypse," he calls it-- the other song where the album's title comes in. "I realize I had said very little about waves or wheels/ Or riding for the feeling/ Riding for the feeling/ Is the fastest way to reach the shore." The richness, as I hear it, is that the line describes how elusive-- and maybe even impossible-- honesty is. I don't have a clear idea of what "riding for the feeling is," but I wonder if that's the point: it's a journey toward something vague and variable. It's about the distance between how simple things feel when you experience them and how cluttered and gummed-up they come out sounding in song or verse. It's about the distance between something like Eagle's "Jim Cain" and "America!": The healthy-looking guy standing in a field telling you in past tense about his heartbreak and the one barking at you live and uncut from an Australian hotel room. One sounds too close to their feelings to make sense of them, the other sounds too far away to embody them. Which is more honest? When his first records as Smog started coming out, it would've been easy to situate Callahan in an axis of singer-songwriters who sounded both rooted in American folk traditions but also radically disjointed from them: Dave Berman (of Silver Jews), Cat Power, and Will Oldham (then playing as Palace). Berman has retired, Cat Power has slowed down, and Oldham, like Callahan, has become the kind of musician who only makes sense within the context of himself. Callahan has nothing to add to the general conversation about music in 2011 but is making the best albums of his career. And despite the superficial changes he makes to his sound or focus, everything he's done ends on similar gestures: a stare, a nod, and the quiet question of whether trying to get to the heart of something is the same thing as actually getting to it. — Mike Powell, April 13, 2011 A1 Drover A2 Baby's Breath A3 America! A4 Universal Applicant B1 Riding For The Feeling B2 Free's B3 One Fine Evening Credits * Artwork By [Cover Painting] – Paul Ryan * Bass – Brian Beattie, Matt Kinsey (tracks: A1) * Drums – Neal Morgan * Electric Guitar – Bill Callahan, Matt Kinsey * Electric Piano [Wurlitzer] – Jonathan Meiburg * Fiddle – Gordon Butler * Flute – Luke Franco * Guitar [Classical] – Bill Callahan * Mastered By – Roger Seibel * Mixed By – Brian Beattie * Piano – Jonathan Meiburg * Producer – Bill Callahan * Recorded By – John Congleton * Snare – Bill Callahan * Vocals – Bill Callahan Notes All songs by Bill Callahan © 2011 Your/My Music