Bill Callahan sounds more like the omniscient narrator of The Big Lebowski than a standard singer songwriter on his latest album. Deceptively dubbed “Apocalypse”, the steadiness of the album narrated by warm-voiced Callahan strikes slowly, but with the strength of an end-times prophecy.
The mountainous ballad “Driver” opens the album, a song dedicated to the country that Callahan sings about often on this record, that of America. This song invokes scenery from “No Country For Old Men” or other brutality-based western films in the same vein. There is something very theatrical in Callahan’s writing and delivery, which is perhaps what is conjuring all these cinematic references. This track is rife with flutes, tribal drums, and Irish influences, marking it as the perfect introduction to a folk-infused walk through what seems to be an ancient and thoughtful mind. He sings “One thing about this wild, wild country / it takes a strong strong it breaks a strong strong mind”, and I get the feeling he is speaking from personal experience.
Following up the marching feel of the album opener, “One Fine Morning” is much slower and less insistent. If “Driver” possesses the brutality of the old western wild country, this track has the air of the final, sad scene of those old films, somehow maintaining sonically the solemnity that these films capture cinematically. Callahan speaks some of the lyrics more than he really sings the, but whatever mode he adopts is equally compelling, equally unique.
The sounds of the album are wonderfully varied: flutes, strings, excellent guitar work, splashes of cymbal, and even a vocal imitation of a flare gun by Callahan at one point. The highlight has to be “America!”, a track so punchy it’s as if Callahan is pronouncing the exclamation mark. “You are so grand and golden” he belts out, but such folksy lyrics are backed by a wall of electronic sound that is decidedly rock.
Callahan sutures self-references and lyrical allusions into his songs with deftness that few songwriters can pull off anymore. “Universal Applicant” is chock full of Biblical allusions that are pulled off so nonchalantly you mightn’t even notice the references if you’re not alert to them. If nothing else, the allusions Callahan includes, both literary and cultural, suggest he’s taking his work pretty seriously, and we have every reason to take him seriously too on the strength of this performance.
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