BILL CALLHAN-Dream River, serpentine minimalist & haunting

[jamestkirk]

Dream River...full album
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96xpXS3 ... vqXp61LUr0

AllMusic Review by Thom Jurek

After the urgent sound of 2011's Apocalypse, where Bill Callahan uncharacteristically turned his wry gaze outward to examine America's physical, psychological, and cultural geographies, he returns to a more familiar interior landscape on Dream River. It too was recorded in Texas, features another cover painting by artist Paul Ryan, and guitarist Matt Kinsey is again ever present. Despite the set's more laid-back overall demeanor, something serpentine is at work. Americana certainly plays its role in the mix, but only as a frame.

On the opener "The Sing," the narrator is in a hotel bar minimally observing in seeming non sequiturs its patrons, textures, and sounds, all as interior experiences. There is a country fiddle in the setting, but a syncopated mariachi rhythm -- thanks to Thor Harris' claves -- dislocates the Southwestern melody, changing its shape in the refrain toward norteño, and in the bridge it moves again, ever so slightly, toward soul -- Callahan even namechecks Marvin Gaye to make sure we get it.

The spacy electric guitars of "Spring" and Harris' Latin beat on the congas are answered by Chojo Jaques' improvising flute. (Think Neil Young accompanied by Ray Barretto and Jeremy Steig.) "Ride My Arrow" is in 6/8. It begins as an almost entirely acoustic ballad, but Jamie Zuverza's Wurlitzer, Harris' congas, and Kinsey's silvery electric guitar all contribute to a rising tension as they wind around one another, but the improvisation never quite explodes. "Seagull" is almost impressionistic save for its constant, laid-back rhythm. It's populated with an instrumental drift where space and indirect stylistic musical carry the skeletal melody. Callahan's vocal addresses the impermanence of place and time as natural extensions of his person and the world, placing the listener in free fall.

Throughout this album everything is taken gradually and either develops or doesn't. This is summed up on the gossamer Americana of the final track "Winter Road." Callahan's simple, direct, interior reflections aren't so much self-satisfied as they are minutely absorbed in the small, fleeting, magic of these moments as they add up and pass by. They barely exist long enough for him to get them down in lyric form (though they've left a clear mark inside). Illustrating them musically already places them in another context, creating its own atmosphere of reverie in the listener.

With Dream River, fans already know what to expect from the man lyrically, and it can't be argued with qualitatively. When you place those lyrics in the context of something so subtly adventurous musically, the result is both engaging and seductive.

[jamestkirk]

Apocalypse...ful album
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li9fZOG ... kVknw6okBx

AllMusic Review by Thom Jurek

Those looking for a logical musical follow-up to Bill Callahan's surprisingly accessible Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle from 2009 might scratch their heads at the sound on Apocalypse. The musical reference point in his catalog is, perhaps, A River Ain't Too Much to Love, under the Smog moniker. It's not that this recording resembles that one musically, so much as it employs outsider takes on American roots traditions to get its seven songs across.

Apocalypse is a song cycle that places the usually extremely inward-looking Callahan in the unlikely role of observer and interpreter of various American myths; myths both externally held and culturally self-referential, that inform the interior world of the protagonist. Recorded and mixed in Texas and adorned by Paul Ryan's iconic painting Apocalypse at Mule Ears Peak, Big Bend National Park in West Texas, the album portrays America in all its complexity from the vantage point of an empathic yet wryly humorous narrator.

On album-opener "Drover," Callahan plays a minor-key, two-chord vamp on a nylon-string guitar, offering a fragmented narrative on a cattle drive. Backed by a full-on rock band led by Matt Kinsey's reverb-laden electric guitar, and colored by Gordon Butler's fiddle, it begs the question: do these cattle actually exist or are they metaphorical elements in the protagonist's psyche? The chorus is the hint as it introduces a lovely second melody and turns the song back on the listener as Callahan sings: "One thing about this wild, wild country/It takes a strong, strong it breaks a strong, strong mind..."

"Baby's Breath" is more fractured and rockist, with a taut balance of acoustic and knife-edged electric guitars populating the musical space. Callahan's protagonist found the right place, the right woman, and lost the latter. He has questions but no answers. "America" is the set's hinge piece. A repetitive, electric, pulsing, hypontic distorted blues--a la R.L. Burnside--that examines America's mythical past and its tarnished present. Callahan name checks songwriting heroes -- Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, George Jones, and Johnny Cash -- by their actual ranks and branches in the armed forces while admitting he's never served, as if that might be the problem; then amid the din to make things more complex, he names our greatest national failures and dirty conquests.

The album's most melodic and utterly beautiful song is the confessional waltz "Riding for the Feeling," with glistening electric piano and Wurlitzer played by Jonathan Meiburg. Closer "One Fine Morning" is a nearly nine-minute, lilting ballad that turns on a couple of chords, some pastoral yet jarring lyrics, and a gospel piano atop strummed guitars, which transmute the listener to another place and time. Apocalypse is a deceptively complex gem.

[jamestkirk]

Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle...full album
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-r7D2G6 ... _Hoqpffqt1

AllMusic Review by Thom Jurek

When Bill Callahan left behind his long held Smog moniker, he gave longtime fans of his lo-fi, mopey, sometimes angry aesthetic some real cause for worry: there was not only the name change, but the reliance on more technology that began with the Diamond Dancer EP and the outright lush production (compared to his past work) on Woke on a Whaleheart. Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle should give them some cause for relief, though the growth on the previous two offerings cannot be erased. There is no grand statement on Eagle; it's merely the record that comes after Woke on a Whaleheart, but it feels more like a Smog record though it doesn't sound like one.

This is the darkest, moodiest set he's issued since Supper in 2003, but it's also easily his most accessible musically and sonically. We don't hear much more than Callahan's idiosyncratic misanthropy offering itself speaking and breathing room on most of these tunes; his baritone is right up front and rarely gets stretched.

His themes seem to center on flight and return, and are no better illustrated than on the opening cut, "Jim Cain," where, along a gently shuffling snare and kick drum, his nylon-string acoustic and electric guitars, and a cheap but effective keyboard, his ruminations are guided. They caress that voice out of its hiding place: "...Well I used to be darker/Then I got lighter, then I got dark again/Somethin' to be seen, was passing over/And over me/Well it seemed like a routine case at first/With the death of the shadow, came the lightness of births/In the darkest of nights, the truth still dazzled/And I work myself, until I'm frazzled/I ended up in search of ordinary things..."

It's a cause célèbre for the album.

While Callahan's songs are characteristically simple: the way they are recorded is relatively more complex. Things are not so shambolic; they are carefully measured, tempered, and sequenced. Songs such as "All Thoughts Are Prey to Some Beast," are based on two-chord vamps, and Callahan's voice does nothing to disguise itself as his lines are short, clipped, and shorn of unnecessary verbiage. But the sense of dynamic tension that gathers as violins, lithe, airy electric guitars playing single string leads, syncopated tom-toms, and synth lines that mimic French horns, offer a wider dimensions.

Ultimately, this sense of circular motion, whether it's flight and return, the human breath, birth, death, rebirth, loss, and love is the elemental construction of everyday life, and hence a lyrical cornerstone on Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. It is perhaps a seminal new more accessible chapter in Callahan's oeuvre of heretofore lo-fi, strictly outsider music.