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| Spin |
 Bill Callahan sings deep and plays slow, and it's easy to mistake his patience for sadness. His 15th album - counting those as Smog - is a spare, rambling mix of country, blues, and '70s rock, but it detonates with lines so direct they barely sound written: "I kept hoping for someone to ask me, 'Who do you think you are?' / So I could tell them." The stoic bluntness also harbors a startling intimacy: When Callahan describes a pile of demos on a hotel bed as "my apocalypse," it's like the thought just dawned on him....full text |
| Reviler |
| he soul of your country called and left you a message. Seven messages.” Thus is how Drag City describes Apocalypse,” the third solo record by singer/songwriter Bill Callahan (formerly Smog). It couldn’t me a more apt description: Apocalypse is something of a seven song paean to America – or at least America as it once was. Callahan has always tended to gravitate towards the culture of the early American West and Apocalypse is no exception. In fact that there are some hints (particularly in the album title) that suggest that Callahan equates the death of our country’s culture with the loss of its connection to its pioneering roots. But like any Callahan record, of course it just isn’t that simple. Callahan begins the record with the line “the real people went away” in “Drover,” expounding over folky country guitar (but with fuzzy electric undertones) about the life of a cattle drover, suggesting perhaps that we no longer have the “real” people our country once did, the kind that used to drive animals across the mountains and plains. Callahan’s lyricism is mercurial though – the simple straightforward meaning never seems to be the only meaning , and the line “when my cattle turns on me / I become a drover double fold,” hints at a metaphor beyond the song’s surface. The five minute plus tune crescendoes in a breathless rush of guitar that seems to echo some kind of confrontation in the artist’s psyche. Similarly in country/blues tune “Baby’s Breath,” Callahan’s enigmatic lyrics evoke a sense of loss – contrasting a plant’s death with the loss of a loved one – a child? A lover? It is never completely clear as Callahan plays his cards pretty close to his chest. Fuzzed out strands of guitar and harmonica punctuate the complexity by mirroring it in tone and obscurity, and while the close-mic’d vocals are incredibly intimate, strict interpretations of Callahan’s nimble words dance just out of reach. ...full text |
| Pitchfork |
| 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....full text |
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