Bill Callahan review – gritty guitars and sharp-toothed Smog revival | Music

The pace quickens, then slows; quickens, slows. Bill Callahan’s voice rumbles over a roiling beat, stitching Partition’s delicate circular melody to a guitar dirge that squares Sonic Youth with Crazy Horse. “You do what you got to do / Do what you’ve got to do … / To touch the picture,” he sings. When the song ends by collapsing in on itself, he says: “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

In truth, he’s been on walkabout for an hour by this point. Callahan is touring Reality, an album as bucolic as this set is spiky. Here its songs – largely sunny indie-folk numbers about nature and fatherhood – run into some of the unruly energy and lo-fi misanthropy of his Smog label days, creating tension that’s fascinating and almost wilfully difficult.

Backed by trusted lieutenants in guitarist Matt Kinsey and drummer Jim White, plus a wildcard in the improv-happy tenor sax player Dustin Laurenzi, Callahan attacks his work from the inside. His voice, rich, warm and immovable, is used as a melodic anchor, allowing his bandmates to tease out fresh ideas while bringing their own personalities to bear on material that can withstand a beating.

Dressed in a black shirt and a sport coat, Callahan sets his stall out by beginning with Reality’s opener First Bird, recasting its pastoral character with something altogether more spare and sharp-toothed. As he sings of his children walking towards him down the hallway, hand in hand, Kinsey scratches and scrapes, whittling wiry sounds from his guitar that couldn’t in good conscience be called a lead line.

The discordance underscores the idea that hooks and lyrics will survive in any setting if they’re solid enough. It’s a gambit that pays off with some regularity here. Pigeons, from Callahan’s 2020 album Gold Record, is winsome and brutish, its reflective Americana given a bleak, portentous edge, while Coyotes becomes a genuine groover, with Laurenzi’s sax cutting through its gritty guitars, taking up space where the bass might normally be before darting off in unexpected directions.

Callahan clearly expects his audience to engage with the fact that he’s presenting something deliberate if potentially jarring, something that might only last for a short while. At the merch table half an hour before he takes to the stage, the scene is reminiscent of the quiet hubbub at a craft stall – people thumb through copies of his epistolary novel and a paperback collection of his lyrics, they inspect copies of his albums on three different formats, and study hand-drawn T-shirts made specifically for the show.

The suggestion is that music, and art, is built to last, but that tonight is for tonight. During Rock Bottom Riser, Callahan’s voice spears through the noise: “diving, diving, into the murk”. It juts out into the room, suddenly outsized, just as it did on the final Smog album. That sweet hit of recognition lasts a few seconds before fading into the unfamiliar drone of the guitars.

The pace quickens, then slows; quickens, slows. Bill Callahan’s voice rumbles over a roiling beat, stitching Partition’s delicate circular melody to a guitar dirge that squares Sonic Youth with Crazy Horse. “You do what you got to do / Do what you’ve got to do … / To touch the picture,” he sings. When the song ends by collapsing in on itself, he says: “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

In truth, he’s been on walkabout for an hour by this point. Callahan is touring Reality, an album as bucolic as this set is spiky. Here its songs – largely sunny indie-folk numbers about nature and fatherhood – run into some of the unruly energy and lo-fi misanthropy of his Smog label days, creating tension that’s fascinating and almost wilfully difficult.

Backed by trusted lieutenants in guitarist Matt Kinsey and drummer Jim White, plus a wildcard in the improv-happy tenor sax player Dustin Laurenzi, Callahan attacks his work from the inside. His voice, rich, warm and immovable, is used as a melodic anchor, allowing his bandmates to tease out fresh ideas while bringing their own personalities to bear on material that can withstand a beating.

Dressed in a black shirt and a sport coat, Callahan sets his stall out by beginning with Reality’s opener First Bird, recasting its pastoral character with something altogether more spare and sharp-toothed. As he sings of his children walking towards him down the hallway, hand in hand, Kinsey scratches and scrapes, whittling wiry sounds from his guitar that couldn’t in good conscience be called a lead line.

The discordance underscores the idea that hooks and lyrics will survive in any setting if they’re solid enough. It’s a gambit that pays off with some regularity here. Pigeons, from Callahan’s 2020 album Gold Record, is winsome and brutish, its reflective Americana given a bleak, portentous edge, while Coyotes becomes a genuine groover, with Laurenzi’s sax cutting through its gritty guitars, taking up space where the bass might normally be before darting off in unexpected directions.

Callahan clearly expects his audience to engage with the fact that he’s presenting something deliberate if potentially jarring, something that might only last for a short while. At the merch table half an hour before he takes to the stage, the scene is reminiscent of the quiet hubbub at a craft stall – people thumb through copies of his epistolary novel and a paperback collection of his lyrics, they inspect copies of his albums on three different formats, and study hand-drawn T-shirts made specifically for the show.

The suggestion is that music, and art, is built to last, but that tonight is for tonight. During Rock Bottom Riser, Callahan’s voice spears through the noise: “diving, diving, into the murk”. It juts out into the room, suddenly outsized, just as it did on the final Smog album. That sweet hit of recognition lasts a few seconds before fading into the unfamiliar drone of the guitars.