BILL CALLAHAN

DREAM RIVER (Drag City)

18/20

He’s on a roll: after the sumptuous double whammy of Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle and Apocalypse, the artist formerly known as Smog returns with another concise set of plaintive ruminations on man’s place in the natural world. Callahan’s explorations of close-up specificities – boat decoration on Summer Painter, Small Plane’s quietly proud paean to driving a loved one home, watching birds in flight on Eagle Landing – are given context through their association with the unknowablity of nature; the narrator of these songs is a man attuned to the world we live in but can never fully comprehend.

Dream River abounds with the sensation of an artist feeling his way around his own material, finding inherent pleasure in matching sings with referents, riding for a feeling. He plays with language, teases resonances out of repetition (“‘Cause life ain’t confidential, no, no, no it’s not/It isn’t and it ain’t confidential, no, no, no” runs Ride My Arrow), impregnates phrases with pauses of portent (opening track The Sing finds Callahan confessing that “the only words I said today are “beer”… and…“thank you””) and makes statements so utterly declarative that they become a form of Taoist tenet (see his claim on Small Plane that, “I never liked to land/getting up seemed impossibly grand” and the way the record ends with the narrator’s realisation on Winter Road that “I have learned when things are beautiful/To just keep on, just keep on/Oh, when things are beautiful/Just keep on”).

It sounds incredible as well, the hushed atmosphere embellished by Callahan’s gorgeously aged barroom croon cresting over lightly fingered Fender Rhodes electric pianos, fluttering flutes, occasional psych- tinged restrained freakouts, jazzy guitar flourishes. It’s a record to cherish, to play late at night and early in the morning; a record to live with and within.

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Words: Josh Baines