anticipate APOCALYPSE, the new bill callahan record

I am LOVING "America!"

i watched david letterman. in australia

Captain Kristofferson
Buck Sergeant Newbury
Leatherneck Jones
Sergeant Cash

What an Army
What an Air Force
What a Marines
America!

that song sounds like filler to me.

kind of funny though

Do you mean judging only by the lyrics? Have you heard the song? Because it's really great and unlike anything Callahan has done. Not filler at all. It's got this propulsive guitar / rhythm thing that makes it sound like it was produced by The Bomb Squad.

don't really know if i'm into this album :( i love callahan but every once in a while he puts out an album that just leaves me cold, and i think this might be one of those. still can't get into "woke on a whaleheart" at all either. though i didn't like "rain on lens" at first and it grew on me eventually so maybe this one will just take time.

i still have never really taken to 'rain on lens' although i did eventually go back and realize it wasn't awful like i thought. i liked 'whaleheart' way better than 'eagle' but i'm happy to wait on the latter.

totally agree with n/a esp. on the rain on lens U-turn. i'm actually totally gutted that i don't love this. the tack i like most is "Riding for the Feeling" which is the one that sounds like it could have fit most comfortably on "...An Eagle". i wasn't looking for a re-run of that album, though, i was excited by the title and actually anticipating something a bit MORE different.

so this callahan is coming out 5 April now, right?

It's out now, on CD, with the LP to follow in a few weeks. Release got brought forward because it leaked.

Do you mean judging only by the lyrics? Have you heard the song?

dude i heard the album. "america" just seems kind of a half-assed, a few good jokes and that's it. it doesn't develop (lyrically or musically).

i still can't really get into rain on lens but supper, which a lot of folks seem to have slept on, is his best IMO.

+ it doesn't sound anything like the bomb squad. it sounds like something from knock knock, though.

i still can't really get into rain on lens but supper, which a lot of folks seem to have slept on, is his best IMO.

supper is him at the top of his game imo. so tightly controlled.
i just listenened to the first side of this, to preserve some suspense for getting the LP, & get the knock knock thing - like america as no dancing or whatever. i'm still super excited, ilx ambivalence forthcoming. jed: it's been a bad year for you!, underwhelming weerasethakul & smog.

"Supper" is definitely one of the best. My favorites of his albums are the ones that exude warmth, I don't really know how else to describe it. Supper, A River Ain't Too Much to Love, and Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle are the big three in terms of warmth for me. Though with Supper part of it might just be the nice red-orange album cover.

listened to Supper again this morning and it's one of his funniest albums. it has lots of jokes.

one of my favorite bill callahan lines is "i never use doors no mores"

all his albums have a mix of warmth and ironic detachment, no? -- that's one thing that makes him interesting. that said, i know what you mean about e.g. "feather by feather" and "guiding light."

some of recent songs that are nominally inspirational or sincere are so straightforwardly platitudinous that you have to imagine he's taking the piss a little bit. he's very hard to "read" though...

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

i never use doors no mores"

my favourite on that is the following line, "i never use stairs, just trees" which is a v vivid image and amusingly ridiculous. are you talking about woke on a whaleheart with the "straightforwardly platitudinous" thing? i remember a quasi-religious theme on that record which stuck in my craw a bit although i don't know that album well enough to go into any detail and, in fact, i don't think i'll ever return to it. i thought the faux-country thing he was doing there was direction at the time of the name change which is why "... and eagle" was such a surprise. i should have know well enough that he doesn't do "directions", i could fully see him making another dour and angry record like "rain on lens" soon.

yeah there are a bunch of those songs on whaleheart but some on eagle as well, no? and on river.

i don't think i'd ever heard a bill callahan song before, but i just heard "baby's breath" and it's great. i like how it gives the impression of looseness, with all the little time & feel changes, but it's still really well-produced & arranged.

then i listened to a couple songs from his previous record and they didn't grab me the same way (honestly i didn't give them much of a chance though).

Apocalypse seems a lot looser in general than his other recent albums, but if you like "Baby's Breath" you might like the rest of it

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.

IF this record has 1000 moments, Eagle has 100,000.

Both Eagle and Apocalypse are favourites of mine but out of the two, I prefer the latter - more consistently excellent and for me the lyrics are the best Callahan has ever wrote.

this was the performance that convinced me that "america!" is the highlight, not the goofy outlier, of this album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwaiE9nZWCk

incredible record and cannae wait for the new one

ne too but i hope it will be better than Apocalypse

nobody does not hope that but we can still be fond of apocalypse all the same

waking up tremulously anxious to hear this every day btw

Apocalypse is his best album.

that's going a little far but there's absolutely nothing wrong w/it

it's not one of my fave callahans but seeing him live on this circuit helped me appreciate it more

i do not generally care for, or at least don't automatically prioritise, shows, but he does something so special, live, i think, like it plays to a strand of his music, to do with timing & tension, that makes it even more itself, in a kinda extra-dimensional way. it becomes ... ultra-smog.

yeah - and more simply for me, you notice how good a guitarist he is, how much he's doing in those economical little turnarounds

it is interesting seeing the new song to know it's another of his kinda woven into a simple, rolling line, like it has the DNA of to be of use or all thoughts are pray to some beast. I think there was definitely a moment (like around a river?) when he seemed to step up & sorta click more with what a guitar could do propulsively, how it could be momentum for him to sing with or else play against, pitching his hesitation against its flow on the well or whatever. I'm curious to hear the arrangements for the new record (which I hear are pretty jazzy/loose), because I generally can't neatly assign a register or style he's working in , now - that he is amid this kinda syrupy late flowering, & playing with these sorta austere & delicate classical sounds seems to mean people are calling him glen campbell or picking up on his mickey newman affection, but it isn't that, to me. I feel like he's doing everything very minimally & then dressing it up well.

he's always been kind of a minimalist, arrangement-wise, and he's always been good live with these kind of steady vamps whose dynamics shift in subtle ways. i've admired this about his live shows since... probably the red apple falls era. he's just got better since.

"it is interesting seeing the new song to know it's another of his kinda woven into a simple, rolling line"

you mean the song he played live in the NYC park?

i'm not sure it will sound the same on the record. maybe it won't be as simple.

no, sure. but that it's a reducible, cyclic thing, though, right? i was trying to find an old youtube of him playing all thoughts, solo, the same kinda thing, & can't. i'm sure it'll be dressier on the record, but i think he is doing something kinda structurally minimal anyway.

yea i'm really excited about this new record. i don't know why but i'm imagining it to maybe be like the looser stuff on apocalypse (e.g. universal applicant or free's), perhaps b/c as schlump said there is some talk about the arrangements being a little jazzy/loose.

anyways i generally do fall into the camp that apocalypse is his best record so far. definitely his most consistent. and i've totally gone to appreciate "america" is a great feature of this album. not the highlight, for me that would probably be "one fine morning." but i really have a hard time picking the highlight because as i mentioned upthread this album has 1000 moments of brilliance and is all around just spectacular

i hope it WON'T be like Free's or Universal Applicant. i'll abandon the ship if that will be the case.
(i hope it will be his Aja lol!)

riding for the feeling is my personal highlight of Apocalypse, (maybe because it sounds like an Eagle track, which i adore)

riding for the feeling is wonderful

the song or the act itself?

Still sounds wonderful to me:

http://devonrecordclub.com/2014/09/20/bill-callahan-apocalypse-round-71-toms-selection/

I made a YouTube playlist of every live performance of "America!" I could find: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR4bkk16IAsi9_3BnQVB-SKtU956b5rsU

The first video is from a show I was at.

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.