**I was recently given a 2011 album by my brilliant cousin Josh Field. The album was "Apocalypse" by Bill Callahan. Josh wrote a spot-on review that sold me on this album, so I'll just copy it here. Pick up the album if you like the review as much as I did, and check out Josh's blog -->here.**
Bill Callahan - Apocalypse
"I consoled myself with rudimentary thoughts/And I set my watch against the city clock/It was way off."
Bill Callahan has been making records for over two decades now, and I never paid attention. I really probably should have. Especially when he used to dated my favourite artist of the new millennium (so far) and lent his deep baritone voice to one of the truly magical moments on her breakthrough album. This year however, as with Braids, it was a single which kept popping up and demanding my attention. A simple guitar picking - somewhere between Josh Ritter and Johnny Cash - accompanies "Baby's Breathe", a song which tells a story of a marriage doomed from the outset, the lyrics and accompaniment are perfect. Delicate, sad, regretful, but changing pace, moving, and then bursts of percussion to drive the madness, and atonal guitars howl like wolves, and yet the gentle melancholy never leaves.
The rest of the album follows suit. Tales of isolation, complaints of misrepresentation, ironic nationalist manifestos - this is lyrically my favourite album of the year. And musically it stands up as well. Where Josh Ritter is happy to stay fairly safe in his folk-rock tower (which I'm quite fond of actually), Callahan explores: "America" is almost disco(!!); "Free's" is reminiscent of Astral Weeks' folk-jazz fusion with its flute solos. Callahan is a first class story teller, and his deep and rich voice, and melancholy soul draws me in to his beautifully painted worlds.
Favourite Track:
This is really hard for me to pick. "Drover" drives against convention. "Baby's Breath" is devastatingly beautiful. "One Fine Morning" has that two chord back and forth (which I love) as it spins with hymn like piano into a hymn to becoming "the hardest part [of the road.]" But I think it's the quietest moments on the album, the most earnest moments, which are the best. And the quietest moment comes on "Universal Applicant." Trapped at sea, a flare goes up and silence fills the track until, with almost hilarious mock solemnity, Callahan whispers the sound effect "Fwooshh..." and "to the universe [the flare] applies." And I am reminded of that great poem "This is how the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper." But it's not over. To add insult to injury, the flare, both the hope for survival and the icon of life's brevity, returns to his small life boat and it burns. All he is goes down with the ship.
"And the punk/And the lunk/And the drunk
And the skunk/And the hunk/And the monk in me
All sunk
Sunk, sunk, sunk, sunk, sunk"
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