A Pick From The Year: Bill Callahan – Apocalypse
2011 was filled with upheavals, interventions and conundrums, music too appraised it’s own influential and addictive past. All the while, hypnagogic acts flowed from the periphery to the centre, hip-hop rejuvenated like it hasn’t for years and tapes n’ mixtapes were the vogue. The past weighed heavy.
Amid all the years hype and releases came Bill Callahan’s fourteenth album Apocalypse. Callahan, a stalwart singer/songwriter, has over twenty years continually delivered cryptic sound postcards of where he’s at. Often introspective, on Apocalypse Callahan seems to have turned the mirror on his craft.
Apocalypse kicks off with the Drover and the line “The real people went away”, pulsating strumming of nylon strings follows, a rockabilly open cord sweeps in, then the tumult of whip cracking, leather snapping, cattle herding rhythm falls in behind. With Callahan’s Drover herding cattle across inhospitable terrain and being pressed for time we glean a metaphorical idea of what it’s like for an artist to bring in an albums from the wild west of life.
Drover acts as something of a manifesto, a mustering and marshalling of creative forces must be undertaken if results are to be had and this is a point that permeates all walks of life.
A hallmark of Callahan is his lyrical ambiguity, listeners are invited to make what they will of songs presented without asking the recalcitrant Callahan to explain himself. Over the course of Apocalypse themes of nutriment, growth, inspiration, loss, solitude, rapture, motivation and meetings arise with the characters Callahan presents confronting these themes and it’s Callahan’s talent as a storyteller that these themes arise implicitly.
The Apocalypse song cycle come to rest with One Fine Morning. Light strumming accompanied with plaintive piano, the narrator sets out unburdened yet tinged with loss to lay his droving to rest, concluding with the haunting sung epitaph DC 4-5-0; Apocalypse’s catalogue number.
Sonically Apocalypse has a strong live and pared back sound that is augmented sporadically with flute and fiddle arrangements. Song structures don’t depart from the tried but rather explore them, with cross-referenced lyrics to other songs within the cycle creating a metanarrative of inspiration and reappraisal. To the fore is Callahan’s singing, measured and passionate with a hint of lachrymose fracturing all along accompanied by haunted and reverberated electric comments from Matt Kinsey’s guitar.
2011, majorities sought another way, found vent with gauche London Riots and fluid considerations of the Occupy movements. Whilst Callahan, a lone man, appraised his craft and what he sought to achieve: all, is a process of confrontations to be journeyed and begot.
