Wow, I genuinely feared I might be done with Bill Callahan, but it seems that was just a little bit hasty – shame on me.
The music industry is an attritional place to ply your trade, especially a trade which demands its pound of flesh so implacably. Because of this, not many artists survive either to a certain age, or a certain depth of back catalogue, or sometimes even just the slow, slow building of their reputation to the point they can be called, even in just an indie sense, a success. Most pack it in long, long before then.
The problem though, is that so many artists, once they get to this place, seem to lose something vital in their music. I’m not so much making the accusation of trotting out the same old shit, more trying to describe a certain elusive urgency which seems to dissipate. It’s understandable. After so many years of your ego and your finances and your love for your art taking a constant battering, to get to the point where you feel, in whatever small way, established probably has the potential to change your outlook on life pretty significantly.
Callahan’s previous musical incarnation, Smog, was pretty established as indie bands go, and when he went solo a few years ago it quickly became evident that Bill Callahan was considered, irrespective of his band, such as it was, to be a pretty significant figure by the music world at large. However his first solo album, Woke on a Whaleheart, just wasn’t very good, in my opinion. It was soft and dreamy and lacked that urgency I mentioned earlier. I feared that in realising he was a big enough star to cast off his established nom de guerre in the first place, Callahan had reached a point where he was pretty much artistically dried out. It happens to a lot of people. However, as this album demonstrates pretty clearly, I would be entirely wrong to think that it has happened to Callahan just yet.
Smog’s music always had a rich, soothing side to it, so discerning the subtleties of what gives this album that vital spark which in its predecessor it seemed missing is an impossible task. It may not quite have the Gothic darkness of A River Ain’t Too Much to Love, but Apocalypse feels very much as if there is something niggling at Callahan again, and that tends to make for good music: something a writer doesn’t just choose to express, but something they feel compelled to express.
Opener Drover is just as purposeful as the subject matter might suggest, Baby’s Breath shifts pace up and down throughout the song with eerie guitar noises bringing an atmosphere of menace, and then there is the incongruously jaunty America. This is a sort of ambiguous national anthem which veers between the damning and the bemused and the irritably defensive, a little like LCD Soundsystem’s North American Scum.
The subtle shifts in pace and mood between these songs just gives the album more liveliness than Woke on a Whaleheart ever had. In fact, in terms of production, this seems much more informed by the intervening Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, which was actually a live recording. It seems less compressed than a lot of recent music, and you can really hear the detail in the instrumentation, which is nice thing – it contributes to the impression that the album is somehow more alive, even during its quieter moments.
Not all of the later songs are great, I must admit, and as much as I love this, I wouldn’t really compare it to Supper or A River Ain’t too Much to Love. Nevertheless one of the weaker songs, Free’s, is an odd, rambling internal monologue chewing over the concept of freedom and that very meditation feels like the underpinning emotion of this record. He does indeed feel free which, as he said at the time, was what the break with his long-time recording moniker Smog was intended to do. I don’t think he cracked it the first time around, but it feels much more like he has here.
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Bill Callahan – Riding for the Feeling
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