Post Description

Op verzoek van Theo, die de Spotnet posts kan volgen via FTDWorld. 

Ik dacht dat er al genoeg posts waren van Bill Callahan's laatste album, maar het is allemaal nep, wat je ziet op Usenet. Ongeveer 87 Mb. Daarmee wordt je op 2 manieren in de maling genomen. Er staat een password op. En als je dan zo naief bent om in ruil voor een password in een SMS abonnement te trappen, dan kan het ook nog eens geen 320kbit zijn, want dat past gewoon niet in 87Mb.

A list of adjectives to describe Bill Callahan's writing and music is a list of contradictions. He's penetrating, he's ironic, he's intimate, he's elusive, he's distant and calcified, he's vulnerable and warm-- it's all there, album to album, song to song, and sometimes line to line. His voice is low and his songs are slow, so it's easy to mistake him for being sad. As a lyricist, he writes meticulously about distance: the distance between people and other people, and between people and themselves. He's a cartographer of broken roads. But more than sadness, his writing represents a stoic quest for understanding in the face of knowing that these gaps usually can't be filled. "There's no truth in you, there's no truth in me," he sang on 2003's Supper. "The truth is between."

Apocalypse is his first studio album since 2009's Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. The contrast between the two is stark. Eagle was a bath of strings, open-air ambience, French horns, and soft, measured drums. It was delicate and planned, it called out warm. Lyrically, the songs were direct and steady admissions of the kinds of sentiments that rise to light after funerals and breakups-- an exercise in what we normally call "vulnerable."

Apocalypse, ostensibly recorded live in the studio with a small band, is idiosyncratic and reluctant. Its narrators chew grass in silence and give you a too-long stare. They have meltdowns in foreign hotel rooms. And they come to us in a sound that is spare and liberated from Eagle's insistence on being gorgeous every single second. It's occasionally distorted, even ugly, a word I wouldn't use to describe almost anything Callahan's done since he recorded as Smog.

One of his most remarkable tricks-- and one he returns to all over Apocalypse-- is the ability to sound both controlled and casual at the same time. The songs here are filled with silly, borderline bad ideas that an artist with less confidence might've scrubbed after taking a long walk and a good rest. "Baby's Breath" speeds up and slows down in a way that sounds unrehearsed, devolving into distorted guitar toward the end. The sloppy backing track on "America!" quotes what sounds like Civil War songs and 50s jungle-rock. (It also casts Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson as part of an imagined U.S. military force and ends on an acidic joke about American imperialism: "Well everyone's allowed a past they don't care to mention.") A few songs feature, prominently, the flute.

But the feeling of spontaneity is also in Callahan's voice and delivery, which brings out the emotional dimension of the lines in ways the lyric sheet can't. On "One Fine Morning"-- one of two songs to use the album's title-- he sings, "It's all coming back to me now: my apocalypse, my apocalypse." The lyric is literally a realization, but it's the way he sings it that brings the feeling across: Curious and questioning, like he actually figured it out while tape was rolling. On "Universal Applicant", he describes a moment where he shoots a flare gun into the air, and punctuates it with a sound: fffff, pouh-- the flare burning and going off. The music falls silent for a few seconds. It's an aside that anchors the song. Ironically, it's not in the lyric sheet.

...

Ach, lees de rest maar op Pitchfork. Waar dit album een 8.0 krijgt