Bill Callahan - Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest (2019)

New 5 songs are on spotify. Lovely.

Its Streaming on NPR!

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/06/729217470/first-listen-bill-callahan-shepherd-in-a-sheepskin-vest?t=1559826628775

Full album is on spotify too. I haven't listened to the whole thing, but I like what I've heard so far.

only up to side 3 ("circles") shows up on spotify for me

Ahh, I didn't realize there would be more than 2 sides. Good news for me is that I can now add side 3 to my list.

After a few spins of sides 1+2, i came to the conclusion that sadly, it is kinda boring and monotonic.

as opposed to all of those edge-of-your-seat, thrill-a-minute Smog records released over the past quarter century

I doubt Nostromo was looking for that. Besides, I can remember being thrilled by The Well and Drover and Riding for the feeling. I've only listened to side one of this but had a dispiriting sense of him singing/saying exactly what I expected him to sing/say but I felt that on Dream River as well.

he says the rhyme that seems so right but it's right and it's boring too.

you can anticipate it on your first listen.

"as opposed to all of those edge-of-your-seat, thrill-a-minute Smog records released over the past quarter century",:

Never liked Smog except for the last 2 records, where he invented himself as "Bill Callahan", which i love.

I think the new record has too many songs/sketches and the melodies are weaker. As a matter of fact, it's hard to distinguish between them.

I will give it a few more spins though.

raaash decisionnns

I've resigned myself to the fact that I don't really like this album all that much. The only exceptional or even memorable parts are the lyrics, and a lyric sheet does not an album make. Really wanted to like it, but every time I listen, nothing really sticks. It's also too long.

Agree. Saw him a few weeks ago; his set was mostly the new lp. I was hoping that hearing them live would help, but nope.

i haven't listened to this very intently yet - just catching it here and there on shuffle as i work through a backlog of 2019 listening. but it seems like the songs are meant to have this offhand quality that is a departure from the fundamentally dramatic mode he's preferred over his career: no matter how laconic or spectral or whatever he might have affected to be here or there, he generally lets the rise and surprise in the words tell the tale, and his appeal as a singer is to use a voice with strong presence and plainspoken lyrics to enhance the sublimity of the ordinary, usually by deferring or hiding what will then seem like it's being revealed, in unexpected or overlooked places. it sounds like the new songs are compatible with that but only if you allow him a bit more of a zen or parabolic quality, without so much of the implicit drama.

Yeah, it's duff this album. Still, I think it's the only record he's put out I since 'Wild Love' that I haven't enjoyed (except 'Rain on Lens', maybe.)

Ah figured I was in the minority on this one because it got great reviews but yeah, I think it’s got some of his strongest lyrical work yet, but the songs just don’t stick for me.

i don't listen to as much smog/bc currently as i used to, so periods come and go (it's probably a side effect in part of not feeling as attracted to the last couple few actually), but rain on lens was always the one i had a pronounced disinterest in.

thinking back to what i remember of it, it strikes me as a record where he had the idea to record a number of things in a style, deliberately, or happened upon that idea and committed to experimenting with it, which would not be his usual way, which seems to have been more a matter of working himself into, or finding himself in, a mood or attitude and naturally writing songs to fit.

maybe the new one has more of the exceptional deliberateness to it. though what we've seen of the process in his interviews/press materials for it suggests he just got displaced by life changes and wasn't quite sure how to recover his former processes/methods, but did do what he felt like was the most natural replacement/transformation of them, at present.