DRAG CITY
8/10
INCREASINGLY bold in saying his cosmic quiet bits out loud, Bill Callahan drifts into reverie on the woozy “Planets” – one of the many spaced-out songs on his new LP – after having stared “at the sky so long I forgot how to talk”. As trumpeter Derek Phelps and regular guitarist Matt Kinsey whip up a suitably galactic storm, the one-time Smog man hears the spheres singing something “vaguely Hawaiian”. “Kilakila Malu”, they chorus. “Kilakila Malu”.
The one-time deadpan king of dysfunction is continuing to follow a slightly yoga-pants-and-Birkenstocks path on his 20th studio LP. Having established himself as a career outsider with 1997’s prowler’s charter “Ex-Con”, the lo-fi Marylander has long-since stretched out from scratchy songs of desperation into more expansive terrain, 2003’s Supper and 2009’s Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle including some of the era’s most acute songs of love.
However, if their extensive leafings from his dream diary had some precedent in his earlier work, the themes of marriage and fatherhood that dominated 2019’s Shepherd In A Sheepskin Vest and 2020’s Gold Record felt like a betrayal for those who liked Callahan more when he could sing “why’s everybody looking at me like there’s something fundamentally wrong?” (as he did on “Palimpsest”, from 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much To Love) and mean it.
If the new model Callahan continues to come out with slightly grandiose, Buddha-like statements (“we must bow our heads to get in and out of what we’re living in”, the 56-year-old nods sagely on “The Horse”),
is a more troubled, and troubling work than its predecessors. Peppered with floaty jazz sections, and unexpected backing vocals (including contributions from Callahan’s son, Bass), its stated intention was to re-engage with a post-pandemic, post-Donald Trump world, though Callahan’s vision of life on the other side of the culture wars is an idiosyncratic one. His mantra amid the Crazy Horse-play of opener “First Bird” is “as we’re coming out of dreams, and we’re coming back to dreams”. His message: the inner world is more meaningful and engaging than the manufactured outrages of the outside one.
