Suddenly, it’s as if Bill Callahan belongs to us on some cosmic level. He’s rarely been anywhere but at the peak of his powers; if he seems to be on a winning streak these past few years, since emerging from the shroud of his Smog and moving fearlessly from American backwater into its deepest, oldest center, it’s because he’s never before been so widescreen-expansive and so homegrown, so much the native son. His new Apocalypse is, if nothing else (and it is everything else), the lyric sheet of the year, finding him in the weird heartland where Neil Young once saw rock formations and men becoming park bench mutations, where Joanna Newsom more recently discovered a dried out Garden of Eden. It’s thrilling to experience these new songs of Callahan’s own travels and visions as they unfold live, especially since some of their lines prove so self-reflexive when the author is present, telling us in person.
My particular favorite, from the stark shipwrecked ending of “Universal Applicant”:
And the punk
And the lunk
And the drunk
And the skunk
And the hunk
And the monk in me
All sunk
Sunk, sunk, sunk, sunk, sunk…
At the Cedar Cultural Center on a Friday night (apocalyptic storm clouds gathering outside, almost literally), he left off the “in me,” as if his presence alone indicated where these personalities reside. But this far into his career, he’s more legend than lunk. In “America!” he conjures a national army made up of country-western stars, and when he spontaneously included George Jones in the brigade, it was hard to overlook his own George Jones attire, seersucker suit and silvered hair, and that general demeanor that suggests it’s painful to speak and the world’s too bright but it’s the artist’s unique burden to sing through it. Was he including himself in a lineage? Or were we?
Callahan has always been wary to define himself as anything, and has described his art as unintentional. “Universal Applicant,” the story of a desperate man pushed to a definitive action, puts his statement to the test: “There’s a flare gun in my hand / I point it straight and point it high / And to the universe it applies.” Is the narrator enacting a decisive moment, or merely responding to unseen forces? Is there meaning in the application, or only a confirmation of existence? For that matter, does Callahan control his music or does it control him, and does one wield the other for any recognizable purpose? Maybe the answer lies in “Eid Ma Clack Shaw,” which tells of the perfect song, dreamt and written down and revealed as profound wordless gibberish:
Eid ma clack shaw
Zupoven del ba
Mertepy ven seinur
Cofally ragdah [sic?]
His finest moment. Well, we can at least glean that Callahan keeps too busy searching for the merest shadow of meaning to even bother with truth. The drama and the story of this search lives just as much in the music as in the words, and drummer Neal Morgan and guitarist Matt Kinsey played all the right musical cues under Callahan’s silent command, serving mostly as accompaniment but sometimes growing the arms and legs of a thumping rock combo. “Eid Ma Clack Shaw” wasn’t quite as convincing in its steady pulse and punch as it is on record (2009’s excellent Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle), but only because the band has moved on to something much more diffuse, more untamed in narrative, with Apocalypse. Opening track “Drover” came off beautifully, all its contours rendered live, its rises and falls marking the interplay between a man and his cattle.
This was a band very much in the mode of its latest creation, making even the gentle and melodic “Sycamore” (from 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart) seem already a long time ago. But some of the most tangled and epic songs from the Smog catalog got worthy play, and lacking even the elusive bearings of America and Apocalypse, they were deliriously strange. The sublime “Our Anniversary,” with its premise of flawed love revealed in painful honesty, was straightforward relief, by comparison. And we needed it, as the “teat / to eat” wordplay of “America!” was yet to come.
Earlier, Hidden Ritual created music of the most perfectly trained accidentalism since Beat Happening, and as an opening act seemed to represent pop music in the world of Apocalypse, all low snaky bass and snare trance and ghosted vocals, but still very tuneful, full of spiky energy. They sound already lost to the past, and might sound even better on record, as it would make them the artifact they aim to be.
Bill Callahan
Neal Morgan
Matt Kinsey
Setlist:
Riding For The Feeling
Baby’s Breath
Too Many Birds
Free’s
Eid Ma Clack Shaw
Universal Applicant
Drover
Our Anniversary
America!
Say Valley Maker
Let Me See The Colts
The Well
River Guard
Sycamore
