Smog is Bill Callahan; underrated pioneer of the lo-fi revolution, a man as partial to a private melancholy world of fractured lives and strange pursuits as he is to parenthesis. Self-obsessed, insular and staggeringly candid about his considerable peculiarities, the greater body of his work (Julius Caesar, Doctor Came at Dawn, Red Apple Falls) reveals the produce of an addled and alienated individual leafing poignantly through a scrapbook of recollections and profoundly intimate sexual preferences; or as his own song, ‘Running and Loping’ puts it: the ‘pornography’ of his past.
11 years into his career and still courting the distressed, thrift store logic of his early four-track recordings (Macrame Gunplay, A Table Setting, Tired Tape Machine, and Sewn to the Sky) and Callahan is still something of an enigma. As is the case with a much longer tradition of American male ‘confessional’ writers and artists – Lee Hazlewood, Leonard Cohen – Callahan’s driftwood songs exhibit the crazy misanthropic ramblings of an amusingly bitter man whose crazy rambling story disturbs and absorbs you in equal measures. His rich, unsettling and careworn baritone is the key here, lulling you into a mercilessly beautiful melancholy whilst at same time rejecting any suggestion of collusion; this is Callahan’s story, his own confessional, and you’re simply asked to endure.
The sparse and light acoustic instrumentation – often rising to little more than a quivering fiddle and a few nervous brush-strokes of the drum – is still surprisingly warm and tender, with songs like ‘Rock Bottom Riser’ and ‘I Feel Like The Mother Of The World’ eschewing all the dazzling imperfections and affectionate departures of difficult love. Exchanging cynicism for a lyrical yet unsentimental pragmatism, the narratives cull from images from the natural landscape of America to illustrate their tales of isolation, loss and temporality. Nature is indifferent and so is Callahan. ‘A River Ain’t Too Much In Love’ is as absorbing a road-movie as you’re likely to get; full of interesting observations, queer philosophical cussing and laden with symbols scraped from a barrel of American mythology: trains, dams, engines, pines, abandoned wells, boarded up buildings, journeys to Phoenix.
There’s something fundamentally wrong with Callahan. For our sakes at least, that’s a good thing.