anticipate APOCALYPSE, the new bill callahan record

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.

artists with genuinely inquisitive approaches to traditional songform, whether this means James Blake and Jamie Woon

james blake's "songs" are utterly pitiful. jamie woon's album is one of my favourite records for a long time, he's great (i think he's going to be huge)... but his approach to "songform" is much more traditional and generic than bill callahan's.

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.

yeah: i think i said somewhere, the thing about his voice being this deep wondrous thing really snuck up on me, & i wouldn't have noticed a concerted change over the past ten years without someone drawing attention to it (i guess i always listen to the newest one?, i don't know). but seeing him sing, this time around, holding the room with a stare and intoning: yeah. one of the things that is maybe me getting too deep, about smog, or more particularly about the branded bill callahan records (& a river), is the kind of baggage that goes with them, with the fact that you're listening to something that's this mix of v talkative, v expressive and yet v open-ended and ambiguous material, all of which winds through the small things that represent bigger, life stuff, like animals etc. i have sometimes caught myself in moments of communion aware that there's this thing that i guess people got from johnny cash, and that is tangled up in manhood and masculinity and the role you're filling when you align yourself with a guy-telling-truths-about-livin', etc. just: his voice is so authoritative, and imbues what he's saying with a feeling of truth, and it's so perfectly coupled with what he's singing about, now. it makes me feel like the guys who'd dig early 2000s popular metal who would permit themselves to cry when they heard one of the withered acoustic slow-jams that the groups would put out. or like the old guy in the background of that townes van zandt waiting around to die clip.

the drummer, i was thinking about the conversation that went on upthread a while ago and trying to hone in on what made neal morgan so preferable to thor, to me. i wonder if it's a timing thing, again; like i associate thor with the smog stuff on whaleheart that pounds and rolls and stomps, that has the kinda (not pejoratively) 'leaden' kick-drum-heavy smog drumming that some people hate. and what was neat about NM was that it was so peppery & not locked down and was complementing what he was saying line for line (kinda like michael stuart, maybe, on laughing stock). just real intuitive & instep with the fact that when you see smog play you're watching lines unfurl one after the next.

i haven't heard the jamie woon LP, you make me wanna!
& as for spinning around on apocalypse!, i think while it does sorta split into the batches people have flagged up above - like the more song-y ones and then the slightly less focused stuff on side two, i'd feel rushed trying to judge it now because it takes me a while to get a handle on where he's going and what he's talking about. side two maybe suffers from the fact that the songs on the first side are fully formed and direct (reading baby's breath as an extended metaphor is still slaying me), and that isn't really what he's shooting for on the looser stuff.

quickly, as i'm listening to it right now, i have to say that

oh the lucky suckle teat
others chaw pig knuckle meat

is pretty damn impressive.

&

Rumpus: Do you read much poetry?
Callahan:I’m not a poetry guy. I don’t understand most of it... I don’t want to be teased with feathers by someone tittering in a harlequin mask hiding behind a pillar

but "Universal Applicant" is as dense and puzzling as most of the poetry i've read. i mean that as a compliment.

i'm pretty sure he reads some poetry, in fact i've heard him talk about it. bill be playin. actually his lyrics have a lot of affinities with lots of modern blank verse. to the point where i could imagine him having gone to the iowa writers program or something. not a criticism or a compliment, just an observation.

lol @ the reviewer thinking he sounds smarter using the compound word "songform." also what's so traditional about callahan? or are all "songs" traditional to this dude?
although this new LP isn't bill's best he is incredibly inventive in lots of subtle and not-so-subtle ways. listen to his singing! he is an incredible singer.
also i doubt there's more bill love on ILX than anywhere else on the interwebs. he's a popular dude.

iirc there was a recent interview in which he got asked about poetry & was all, i like that white donkeys guy!, unsure if tate was poetry or not. i don't have any hesitation in calling bill a poet, but for knowing that he is more prominently the thing he is*; taking the words alone strips them of the delivery that adds a whole other layer.

who constitutes modern blank verse, amateurist? i would love tips on this.

* none of the words for this are appealing, obviously, 'singer-songwriter' & all.

this is a good wednesday record

ok, i will put it on tonight then. i haven't listened to it yet. callahan's voice is a wondrous thing indeed. but sometimes it grates as it is too much. did he do something to his voice or is his bass natural? is he a smoker maybe?