Depending on your previous experience with Bill Callahan, his 2011 album Apocalypse might underwhelm you on first listen. All but one of these seven new songs are over five minutes long, with many (“Universal Applicant” springing immediately to mind) settling early into a mid-tempo holding pattern that can feel aimless and plodding. Gone is the lush instrumentation of 2009’s Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, leaving Callahan’s guitar picking front and centre, supplemented only occasionally by tasteful flute or piano solos. In stark contrast to that album’s sense of grandeur and poetic urgency, Apocalypse is a decidedly relaxed and meditative affair. The narrators of these songs are almost always passive, and repeated reference is made to the acts of listening, watching and remembering (on “Riding for the Feeling,” Callahan solemnly intones, “With the TV on mute/I'm listening back to the tapes.”).
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If there is one exception to this mood, it would definitely be the album’s opener, with its charging tempo and thundering vocals. Here, Callahan sings from the point of view of a cattle driver and the landscape he paints comes straight out of cowboy mythology. But the lyrics to “Drover” betray a distinctly idiosyncratic ambition. Although the narrator opens with a fierce show of loyalty to his cattle, by the song’s end he is admitting, “I am in the end a drover/A drover by trade/When my cattle turns on me/I am a drover, double fold.” There is an epiphanic quality to these lines, a sense that this character has only just discovered his true role, and is seeing himself clearly for the very first time. A quiet sense of ambiguity and quiet rumination, which will colour so many of the songs on Apocalypse, makes its first appearance here.
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It should be said, however, that Callahan is far too experienced a songwriter to cultivate ambiguity merely for its own sake. “All of the thinking” in these songs (to borrow a line from 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart) leads to some wonderful poetic insights. Over “Drover”’s booming chorus — where you might expect to hear about prairie fires, or straggler picked off with a rifle — Callahan sings beautifully about the speaker’s conflicted experiences:
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One thing about this wild, wild country
It takes a strong, strong
It breaks a strong, strong mind
And anything less, anything less
Makes me feel like I'm wasting my time
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There is a profound maturity invested in these lines: we sense immediately that such an opinion could not have been reached easily or quickly. To speak these lines is to already possess a full back story, one in which the meaning of "this wild country" became clear only gradually, pieced together as it was out of many contradictions.
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The sense of loneliness and melancholy only hinted at in this passage come into full view on “Baby’s Breath,” which concerns an old man reflecting on a life filled with failure and disappointment. Once again, the lyrics are quietly powerful, and boast some wonderfully complex imagery, such as the following:
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I'd cut a clearing in the land
[…] for a little bed
For her to cry comfortable in
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Each stanza begins as a fond memory, which the narrator then probes to reveal a hidden (and usually unexpected) dimension of failure and decay. In contrast to “Drover,” however, the song’s arrangement is muted and spare, with the same guitar signatures repeating over and over, ad nauseum. Largely for this reason, it can take until the third or fourth listen before you realize what the band is up to. The narrative arc of the lyrics is in fact brilliantly heightened and echoed in the repeating bass and guitar lines: after propelling us quickly through the first few bars, the instruments gradually lose momentum, before spluttering to a stop by the end of the verse. Callahan’s guitar bridge then takes over, and loops us back to the beginning of the original signature, as well as forward to the next stanza. Each time, the narrator’s hope of rediscovering the past is rendered palpably desperate, before being dashed brutally.
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On “Free’s”, the spare instrumentation is put to an entirely different cause, but to equally impressive effect. Set against Callahan’s heavy-hearted ruminations on freedom (which, as usual, are sung in his dark and austere baritone), Jonathan Meiburg’s light piano flourishes create a terrific contrast. Where the singer can only describe the pitfalls and hazards of attaining freedom, Meiburg’s bold and adventurous playing is freedom itself, perfectly symbolizing the self’s tantalizing separation from its ideal.
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For all these reasons and many more, Apocalypse is a record that both demands and rewards multiple listens. For each lyric, the singer and his band have created a rich instrumental counterpoint that sounds misleadingly simple. Nothing here is likely to set the charts on fire, and few people are going to find comfort or reassurance in a song cycle so overtly ambivalent and opaque. Still, it would be quite a stretch to call the album difficult or experimental; the only real obstacle to “getting” these songs would be the listener’s own impatience with considering their nuances. For those who are willing to invest the time, Apocalypse has something great to offer: mature and honest communication with a brilliant singer-songwriter, who is at the very top of his game.
