BILL CALLAHAN | Apocalypse

By David D. Robbins Jr. | Their Bated Breath
Bill Callahan “Apocalypse”
Out now via Drag City

Music is often a sign of the times. It says something profound about the state of the world when some of 2011’s most well-respected musicians turn their gifts toward describing that indeterminable feeling one gets when humanity seems destined to destroy everything that’s good. PJ Harvey asks “How is our glorious country sown?” in her song “The Glorious Land” — wondering what the heck is happening to the old England she loves. Radiohead’s newest release, “The King of Limbs”, a title with obvious war imagery, is half-strewn with tracks that sound like fairy-tales gone terribly wrong. The world they’re singing about is rushing headlong into the void, expressed in frenetic instrumentation in songs with names like “Feral”. Now, Bill Callahan is echoing similar feelings of unease.

The gorgeous “Baby’s Breath” talks of greed and having to ‘reap what you sow’. Callahan takes Harvey’s disillusionment of country a step further, and with some humor in the track, “America!” It’s a severe missive, sarcastically proclaiming a desire to travel to the “golden” and “grand America” and watch David Letterman on television. It’s a track pointed directly at mythical America. The bullshit America — the one that sits idly by while “the lucky suckle teat” and “others chaw pig knuckle meat.” That piece of lyricism clashes hard-consonants up against each other like a syntactic meat-grinder — just the same way America often chews up and spits out its impoverished.

Callahan doesn’t take his foot off the pedal in this foot-stomping funk-jam. He coaxes, teases and baits, amid his grub-work guitar and gristle-fuzz rhythm. Callahan sings softly but carries a big stick. In fact, he’s downright bludgeoning, listing a litany of American debacles: “Afghanistan! / Vietnam! / Iran! / Native American!” It’s goddamn genius. But he still finds room for humor, enlisting his own army, which consists of artists and musicians he admires: Kris Kristofferson is the captain of this make-believe force, Johnny Cash is its sergeant, Leatherneck Jones and Buck Sergeant Newbury. It’s reminiscent of the revolutionary fun Parliament had on its track, “Chocolate City” — where the group listed the names of artists who would be better suited for positions of government, like Richard Pryor as Minister of Education, Stevie Wonder as Secretary of Fine Arts and Aretha as First Lady.

But Callahan isn’t all bared teeth. His soft flute and familiar western guitar flares are still there. He also joyously describes the world through its relations to animals and nature. In “Universal Applicant” he asks what exactly a person is without the lessons of nature: “Without work’s calving increments / Or love’s coltish punch / What would I be? / And animaless ishtmus beyond the sea.” In other words, connection to animals and the earth breeds a Whitman-esque connection to everything. It’s a spiritual song, that works as an endless digression into thought, until the track’s protagonist disappears. A man goes out onto a boat, pondering nature, then shoots a flare into the air. The flare falls back to earth, and burns the boat, and the drunken man drowns. Tom Waits did a similar disappearing act in his song “Alice”, where a man thinks about a woman while trying to skate her name into a pond. By the song’s end, his cerebral ruminations cause him to forget he’s skated the name ‘Alice’ twice into the ice, and it cracks before he sinks to his death.

The range of songs is quite amazing on this short seven-track record. The opening track, “Drover”, is a simple one compared to the songs that follow. Callahan turns on his storytelling gifts, describing the thoughts of a cattle driver who gets knocked down, and picks himself off the ground, only to continue his task. It’s a song that plays like Western nostalgia, and a love of untamed nature — not unlike the theme of many Cormac McCarthy novels. A drover loses himself in thoughts of his cattle and the wild land. The one moment civilization creeps in (the drover sets his watch to the city clock) he finds the time “way off”.

It’s difficult to fight the desire to read into Callahan’s lyrics. You could listen to “Riding for the Feeling” and simply hear the story of a man saying goodbye to something. Or you could focus on the line “With the TV on mute / I’m listening back to the tapes” and think of Callahan himself listening to his own music and wondering if he’d said all he wanted on the record before putting it to bed. Or if you’re a real literati, sometimes when Callahan sings the refrain, “riding for the feeling” it sounds like “writing for the feeling” — and you get this cool sort of dual meaning from it all. There’s strange and inventive syntax scattered all among this record. Phrases burst open, confuse and bewonder: “To belong to being” or “it takes a strong, strong it breaks a strong, strong mind”, and the word-soup magic of “the punk and the lunk and the drunk and the skunk and the hunk and the monk in me all sunk.” One of his song titles, “Free’s”, cleverly gives possession to the word ‘free’. It’s a gorgeous bit of wordplay in a song that sashays elegantly through light Wurlitzer piano, jazzy flute, sparse lyricism, humming, and gentle scatting.

“Apocalypse” is as prettily expansive as the prairie landscapes and diversions of the mind it tries to describe. It moves from the simplicity of Western life and open spaces to the complexity of human thought and finespun lyricism. Perhaps its most exquisite notes come at the end. “One Fine Morning” draws the curtain, revisiting a number of the earlier topics of the record — ‘drovering’, ‘riding’, and ‘apocalypse’. It’s a piano dirge that works as simmering sunrise and the sincerest of sunsets. It’s hard to tell whether it’s the beginning or the end. The cowboy at the end of this Western rides off into a sunset undetermined. It’s the apocalypse hidden in a child’s lullaby. Who else but Callahan would write a verse as marvelous as, “The curtain rose and burned in the morning sun / And the mountains bowed down like a ballet / Like a ballet of the heart”? Strangely, but majestically, the song ends with Callahan repeating the phrase “DC450” to fade. What is “DC450”? Well, it’s the record’s catalog number. It’s beguiling and beautiful, like the entire record.
Bill Callahan “Baby’s Breath”