Bill Callahan/(smog)

‘The Doctor Came at Dawn’, the first (smog) record I bought, wasn’t something I immediately warmed to- Bill Callahan (he’s recently ditched the (smog) moniker in favour of his given name) isn’t an artist who goes out of his way to make you like him, although he doesn’t have to- if you have any sense, you’ll eventually come to him. Although I wasn’t initially taken with the haphazard tuning and the sparse, seemingly aimless nature of many of the songs, the record sat like a niggling thought in the back of my mind, and I kept on returning to it again and again, and each time it revealed a little more of itself. It’s a record you can almost *taste* the musty oppression of ‘You Moved In’, the obsessive creepiness of ‘All your Women Things’, the funereal laughter and stark silences of ‘Hangman Blues’….  the whole record reeks of camphor, mould and stale whiskey- a taste one doesn’t quickly forget, even if it sticks in the throat to start with.

Many of his records, especially the more recent ones, are a lot easier to digest- Callahan’s songs (if you can call them such- they’re often more like musical haikus, or extended mantras, his golden baritone swaying assuredly in and out of metre like a prize-fighter) more often than not utilise very conventional instrumentation, but whereas, for example, Will Oldham is a songwriter in the classic sense of the word, for Callahan everything, and I mean everything, is a slave to the intent behind the songs- that he often chooses to glove his words in a gorgeous, countrified velvet, or to lace his tales of darkness and distress with a dry, wry sense of humour, only serves to heighten the impact of the iron fist beneath. He’s never pretentious, sentimental or flowery, but instead employs terse, often tough language to examine human (and, one imagines, particularly his own) psychology in an often uncomfortable, sometimes oblique, sometimes painfully direct, but always but uniquely rewarding way.

Particularly recommended: ‘Knock Knock’, ‘Dongs of Sevotion’, ‘Julius Caesar’