Bill Callahan: Apocalypse
Album Review of Bill Callahan's new epic, Apocalypse [Drag City 2011]:
Even after twenty something years, a dozen or so records, and a few name changes, Bill Callahan's music is still weird. It doesn't matter how hi-fi it gets, how approachable, how bright, how beautifully arranged or how intricate, at its root it's just as bizarre today as it ever was. Many are the songwriters who've experimented with form, but Callahan belongs in his own special category. His songs function according to their own physics, but not because he sets out to make them different.
Rather, as on his newest record, Apocalypse, it's as if he just says something, and music magically follows. He speak-sings, and like a light, the music, in all its casual, improvised texture, clicks on. Why that sudden shift into a major key? That's where the voice needed it to be. From whence the violin? The flute? Birthed of that same big, bad baritone.
Naturally, the words that shape the voice get emphasized themselves. They describe, after a fashion, a kind-of narrative, a tonal arc maybe, seemingly as unintentional as the music itself. The words express a feeling of narrative, and it pervades both the record's discrete grooves and its arc as a whole. That is, you get a feeling of progress. You get the impression of a plot, the general shape of the path a comet makes burning up in the atmosphere of its telling, or of a dandelion, it's puffball of persona diffusing over a plateau of its own creation.
The album opener, “Drover,” gives us our first cowboy. Protective of his cattle even after they knock him briefly unconscious, he swears anything less than “this wild, wild country... makes me feel like I'm wasting my time.” His stiff upper lip, his determination to be always more of who he is, his pride in his identity, sets the stage for the dissimulations of the album's second half. It's only because of the foundation of a character so proud of the habits of his trade, that losing those habits later becomes meaningful.
This isn't to say that the narrators of each of the album's seven tracks are the same. It isn't that this cowpoke is the same character as the jerk singer in “Baby's Breath” who runs out on his wife, or the troubadour of “America!”, who “never [having] served his country”, watches Lettermen down under—but that the one voice driving the record comes to inhabit each of these characters, to wear each of them like a mask, and to perform its own story through each of the other stories.
The loner, the rake, he who stands in opposition to the elite fighting force of yesteryear's C&W singers—
Captain Kristofferson
Bucksergeant Newberry
Leatherneck Jones
Sergeant Cash
What an army
What an airforce
What a marines
—is dismantled by the record's midpoint.
In “Universal Applicant,” to the subtle shifting of African-style guitars, he fires his application to join the universe, a flare, at the sky. It bursts lavender, but falls back to his little boat. When the boat burns up and sinks, it takes with it the people he'd been.
This freeing loss of identity, and the sudden realization of who you still are without it, is the apocalypse to which the title of the record refers, and through which the album concludes. The final three songs are more reflective than those that come before. It's as if Callahan, in losing “the punk/And the lunk/And the drunk/And the skunk/And the hunk/And the monk” to the sea also lost the pretense of characters. Sure, the breaking-down performer in “Riding for the Feeling” could be just another character, but there's something in the revelation that he's playing just to play, riding just to ride, looking for a way to say goodbye, that feels both free and vulnerable at the same time.
That cocktail of feelings fills the album's final moments with a kind of disintegrating. Free of his various personas, characters, and masks, Callahan sings in “Free's” “leaving is easy/if you've got somewhere to be,” and by the end of “One Fine Morning,” he's already a part of the road. Now we'll drover over his back, his molecules and was-es infused into everything. It's a striking ending, and not just because of its contrast to the sweep of its beginning.
One of Callahan's great abilities is to come across as both off-the-cuff and intentional, strikingly meaningful and adlibbed. It's no big shock then that when it's over and you find yourself affected by what you've just heard, you'll wonder, what the was that? And at the same time understand it perfectly.
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Video & Audio of Bill Callahan's Apocalypse, "Drover" Track