anticipate APOCALYPSE, the new bill callahan record

just now listening to this (totally behind, i know!): http://3voor12.vpro.nl/speler/luisterpaal/44622033#luisterpaal.44622033
sounds really good! i like the loose vibe. "free's" kinda sounds like van morrison!

also is this his prog album or something? seven songs, averaging almost six minutes!

j. newsom influence finally showing itself in the world.

http://eagleflieswiththedove.tumblr.com/post/4064333234/bill-callahan-smog-animal-concordance-2011-edition

missed the lion in Eid Ma Clack Shaw

Listening to this now and enjoying it. I like that he's getting more dynamic with each release.

anyone read the SFJ article?

yeah i thought it was pretty eh

seemed weird to mention Fred Neil and Merle Haggard as references but not Leonard Cohen? trying to keep it all american i guess.

agree with the resonant frequency article on pfork that this album sounds amazing.

re sfj, it's true that sometimes you can hear the relevance of his chest to his voice, i think.

one of the things that strikes me more and more as one of callahan's market-leader-virtues, a thing that he's the best at, is his timing; it seems like a genuine awareness of the form that you can play around with momentary gaps and hesitations, the modifying effect they have on how we receive what he's saying; in are you still tight/with that pharmacist on supper; the long reveal of the heartbeat line on the last record, and* pitching a line in baby's breath to young girl/at the wedding, when the song's baggage maybe suggests that saying young girl would be very specific and referential without the second half of that line. i know poetry isn't just for the page but it feels like part of what's good & what's skilled about him isn't his words as-read, but how he's sending them at you.

(* i wouldn't ordinarily dip into the sorta biographical/tabloid concerns of this sorta thing, but the hypothesised relationship between baby birch & j-new & baby's breath & the weed/flower metaphors is kinda fascinating & multi-dimensional imo)

i think you can find discussion of that point on one of the old smog threads. the timing, i mean.

the thing about that sfj article is that he chooses songs, and quotes at some length from lyrics, that i don't find all that interesting. he chooses the lyrics that have some definite and fairly transparent meaning and are funny or clever in some way (or are about music, like the shout outs to singers on "america!") but i'm more interested in a lyric like (e.g)"i started running/ and the concrete turned to sand" which are more mysterious and evocative to me. and, moreover, it just seems like he doesn't "get it". certainly not if he thinks this is bill's best record.

and when he quotes the lyrics he does quote i can imagine they just seem very flat and uninteresting written down.

the thing about that sfj article is that he chooses songs, and quotes at some length from lyrics, that i don't find all that interesting.

Yeah, and he's less interested in Callahan's great timing.

I don't love this album like its predecessor; the only ones I still return to are "Baby's Breath" and "Riding For the Feeling." But I'll keep trying.

i'm pleased to say i'm getting into this.

"my cattle
tss-tss"

love that bit in Drover. tss-tss...

'still'??

good interview - http://therumpus.net/2011/04/the-rumpus-interview-with-bill-callahan/

The styles are converging in the present day, also, but in a more clinical or unloving way. The current music is mostly like a doctor’s visit. Where you check off the questionnaire about the past and hope they don’t stick a finger up your butt.

that is great.

Callahan: I’ve been listening to Marvin Gaye. ‘What’s Going On’ and ‘Here, My Dear’ albums. They have a density and an insularity that I like. In that way that you can push insularity to the point of it being so wide open and close. I’m not sure if the mixes are right, I’m still analyzing that. Too much reverb. I might need to do a remix.

also the part about politics.

It can be hard to comprehend but playing a show is like knocking down a city and building a new one in the space of an hour or two. You first need to knock down the city the audience has built while waiting for you. Because they don’t really want to be in that city they built, they just didn’t know what else to do with their minds while waiting. Then you build them a city.

absolutely superb but i wish she had followed up on some of his points. i want to know more about baby's breath being a series of alternate endings.

It can be hard to comprehend but playing a show is like knocking down a city and building a new one in the space of an hour or two. You first need to knock down the city the audience has built while waiting for you. Because they don’t really want to be in that city they built, they just didn’t know what else to do with their minds while waiting. Then you build them a city.

I can imagine all the pauses he'd inject were he singing these as lyrics.

the poetry response is hysterical. obv he can be very funny but he's downright kooky a lot of the time here.

i think i like interviews that, job interview style, suffix thoughts & subjects with, talk about this.

yeah one fine morning
yeah its all coming back to me now
my apocalypse my apocalypse

i love this bit ^

has anyone caught any shows on the tour?

i saw him last night and was just blown away. it was one of those shows when you're subconsciously chastising people you know for not having been there to see it. his group are pretty much perfect - neal morgan drumming inventively & a guy i don't know playing alternately neat and messy guitar. a couple of older things had some nuance lost in the swampiness, but otherwise everything was totally sympathetic and measured, given the appropriate angles and turns. and hearing him sing!, like, i read the SFJ thing and i think having heard his voice change LP by LP hadn't really noticed that it had gotten so deep, but it's a huge part of what he is about now: that there's this huge authority to what he's intoning, word by word, and that it's then suddenly steered or changed by his inflections and melodies and lifts and growls.

really booming bathysphere also, which i ordinarily hope he won't play having seen it a bunch of times, with wild ad-lib lyrics, one line, "my father is a pork chop". just go see him.

I was there last night! Thought it was amazing, you've said everything I thought. Great venue too, never been there before.

oh neat! i wonder who you are (were you the tall guy with a beard, lol). it was nice there; i was kinda near the front so the venue/my periphery was just full-of-smog, but it was a nice hall, sure. i'm broke but tempted by low next week. bummed to have missed group doueh the same night though.

i kinda-liked sophia knapp, too. she had this breezy LA FM radio vibe, like it was the kind of thing you wish would play on the radio if you drove interstate through the night. halfway between the chromatics & fleetwood mac. it sounded like what the girl on night drive would be listening to on her night drive if she wasn't listening to night drive.

but yeah bill was great. someone online said he looked like he was enjoying himself in his own way, & i think that's right - he was on such good form. doing the kinda cowboy-ish stuff off'f the new one makes him such a badass.

sounds great, i'm going to see him in july. the record, especially side one, is really doing it for me.

I was fairly near the front too, on the side of the stage by the drummer (who was amazing).

I like the way he does a little horsey trot during Eid Ma Clack Shaw.

nate we were so close

was just listening to this...so good! sometimes all that's left to do on album is sing the catalog number. deeee ceeee four five ohhhh.

and glad the live show is shaping up...he's coming to my area in june, will definitely buy a ticket.

I like the way he does a little horsey trot during Eid Ma Clack Shaw.

don't get me wrong, i love bill but this sounds like some twee sufjan stevens ish. anyway.. missed him in austin a week or two ago. would've liked to see him do the new album tunes, love it front to back, mostly. but i've seen him plenty over the years.

Is the new drummer better than Thor?? Find that hard to believe. Thor rules.

Love this album. Bill 4eva

don't get me wrong, i love bill but this sounds like some twee sufjan stevens ish

it's just treading on the spot, it wasn't like a stageshow or anything.

drummer creams thor imo but i realise that i am going to have trouble persuading people that there is a better drummer than a guy called thor. just so light at the right times and so full on at others, both of these exemplified by america!

saw Thor with Swans a couple months back, dude is fucking immense

Thor's twitter is fucking hilarious fwiw

so this is an uneven record...but 'drover' and 'riding for the feeling' would be in my callahan POX

yup, those are my two keepers from the record, both A+ tunes

I'd include "Baby's Breath" too.

Drover and Baby's Breath are my favorites. I like America! for LOLs and Riding For The Feeling is pretty good. But yeah, so far the rest seems pretty indistintct to me.

universal applicant is probably my favorite, along with drover

For some reason that one just hasn't clicked for me yet.

did anyone read the wire review of this record! total pan -- and an ILX diss? something about how will oldham and callahan should have their credentials revoked & be banished along with iron and wine and bright eyes(!? lol) to ILX. kind of a surprisingly clueless review for the wire imo.

Perhaps, it's time to revoke the canonical status of persistent underachievers such as Callahan and Will Oldham (don't even get me started on Iron & Wine and Bright Eyes) and banish them to ILX for good, diverting our attention more fulsomely towards artists with genuinely inquisitive approaches to traditional songform, whether this means James Blake and Jamie Woon or Alex Tucker and Richard Youngs.

I don't think he's associated iron & wine / bright eyes w/ ilx, just callahan and oldman

still an idiot obv

ah, right. yeah, the whole review was fairly dumb.

yeah it was talked abt in the wire thread iirc

Link?

schlump, i saw him a few weeks ago in glasgow. probably the best i've ever seen him perform. i can't get over just how good his voice sounds these days. the drummer was absolutely fantastic too, i agree, very creative and unique; sometimes very spare, sometimes extremely intense. full marks to that guy.

i like this album a lot now which is pretty much the first time i've changed my mind about one of his records.

I don't really know why I did this, except that seeing the song performed live really opened it up for me. The album version is great but it's so heavy live.

you should make a supercut of every time he speak-sings "Leatherneck Jones"

What if Jenny Hval's "Apocalypse, girl" was a response album to this one

DC 450 oh, oh

This was a perfect soundtrack to washing up this evening.

I'm not sure of the meaning of "America", though. (I can't quite untangle the possibly dry humour).

I always took it as weighing the speaker's homesickness and affection for some aspects of American culture against the speaker's knowledge of the historical complicity of white Americans with genocide and imperialism, not really advancing an argument so much as exploring that affective dissonance.

i thought he was just being a smug child of privilege, bragging about chilling ironically carefree indie rock star style in australia, while you sad fucks have to get up and go to work LOL

And when my cattle turned on me, I was knocked. back. flat.
I was knocked out cold for one clack of the train track.
Then I rose, a colossal hand buried, buried in sand.
I rose like a drover.
For I am, in the end, a drover.