Bill Callahan fans are a restless, reverent and insatiable lot. A loose collection of zealots, they can devour every last grain of 2009’s Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, spend days comparing the syntax of Callahan’s lyrics to the lines in his 2010 epistolary novel Letters to Emma Bowlcut and still reserve the audacity to demand the “chosen one” create something as indelibly dark, funny and misery-conducting as his deceased alter-ego Smog’s work in the last gasps of the ‘90s.
It’s perfunctory to declare right away that 2011’s Apocalypse is not the Red Apple Falls or The Doctor Came at Dawn some zealots wish it was. Callahan is fond of destroying legacies as quickly as he creates them, preferring to let each work remain a singular journey. Thus, all the history and baggage one brings to the listening experience is one’s own and should be jettisoned with haste.
Undervaluing Eagle because it wasn’t Wild Love was a mistake. Such an error could only be topped by dismissing Apocalypse now that Callahan is a full-on southern gentleman who prefers bourbon, gospel piano and woodwinds over tape hiss, Jim O’Rourke melodies and cello drone.
That’s not to say, however, that Callahan’s unmatched array of natural symbols and thematic motifs don’t wind their way once again throughout his music.
Album opener “Drover” feels like the offspring of Eagle’s “All Thoughts Are Prey to Some Beast” and “The Wind and the Dove.” Over fiddle and high-tempo acoustic guitar, Callahan delves into the relationship between the “strong strong mind” of a cattle herder and the “wild wild country” he tames.
The song bears a passing resemblance to the Smog classic “I Break Horses” but distinguishes itself with lines like “I am, in the end, a drover/ A drover by trade./ When my cattle turn on me/ I am a drover double-fold.”
Although there is no real title track present, Callahan uses the unforgettable timbre of his voice to inflect the word “apocalypse” with an elusive significance each time it’s used. In “Riding for the Feeling,” he sings, “In conclusion, leaving is easy when you got someplace you need to be …/ With the TV on mute/ I’m listening back to the tapes/ On the hotel bed/ My my my apocalypse.”
One could read the song biographically and conclude that the lines are Callahan’s personal laments as a wanderer who started in Silver Spring, criss-crossed the country and ended up in Austin. Connecting the dots this way, however, is fallacious and does a disservice to the cinematic potency of the moments Callahan sketches in the piece.
Closing track “One Fine Morning” also delivers a consistent dosage of the a-word: “One fine morning/ Yeah, it’s all coming back to me now/ My apocalypse, my apocalypse/ The curtain rose and burned/ In the morning sun.”
The piano accompanying him strikes an appropriately religious tone as Callahan tells of everything that happened under the glare of “the morning sun.” It’s not like Callahan to offer a hymn to send the listener off, but one is still left nodding when he asks “When the earth turns cold/ And the Earth turns black/ Will I feel you riding on my back?”
It’s not difficult to surmise that Apocalypse is deeply political in its own abstract way. All but one of the tracks are longer than five minutes, with changing dynamics that strongly encourage the listener to follow Callahan’s peripatetic, ever-riding narrator as he surveys the physical and emotional geography of the country.
Callahan asks, “Is this what it means to be free/ Or is this what it means to belong to the free?” in “Free’s” and naturally refuses to provide a satisfactory answer because he’s “standing in a field of questions.” In the aggressive, rumbling “America!,” he is very funny, name dropping Native Americans, Afghanistan, the Bible Belt and Iran before singing “Everyone’s allowed a past/ They don’t care to mention.”
It might seem as if Callahan worship is an activity best limited to bearded English majors who have given up on modern poetry in favor of buying Will Oldham, David Berman and Smog LPs. While this may be true, something as rarefied as Apocalypse is too good to be labeled something like “literate Americana” and easily put away.
In fact, if Callahan keeps coming up with lines on the level of “Oh young girl at the wedding/ Baby’s breath in her hair/ A crown in lace above her face/ That will last a day before it turns to hay,” the word apocalypse should be redefined to mean any year that passes without him releasing something new.
RATING: 4.5 out of 5 Stars
vmain13@umdbk.com
