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Bill Callahan’s last album, Reality, played with convention in its title, printed backwards on the cover. His new one has a playful touch too: it’s called Resuscitate!, with an exclamation point.
Callahan’s music used to be much more experimental, when he started in 1990 under the name Smog: intentionally crude and lo-fi. But for the last 30 years or so, his albums have found him perfecting what a Bill Callahan song should be - poetic and brushed with Americana - and in the last 25 or so, he's developed a voice to match.
There’s always a sense of adventure within the parameters Callahan sets for himself, and on Resuscitate! more than usual. It’s a live album, and hearing the way he and his band breathe new life into these tracks, its name, and that exclamation point, become self-apparent.
On Reality, which I reviewed with help from Elliott Childs a few years ago, ‘Natural Information’ is breezy and light, but here, the pace is slowed, and there’s a lot more heft to each instrument.
Maybe that’s to be expected in a live setting, but the track runs a good three minutes longer than its album version too.
Callahan’s songs are built for digressions, often operating around just a few chords. And that gives him and his band room to deconstruct, and play around.
In the liner notes to ResuscitateI, he acknowledges the changing nature of these tunes, saying “Songs tend to mutate after they've been recorded. These songs were mutating faster than usual. Like whatever happened to Bruce Banner in the lab – I knew these songs were about to get superpowers… this change needed to be documented.”
Most of them are taken from Reality, but ‘Drover’, from the album Apocalypse, gets a roiling makeover, with jangled electric guitar and Nick Mazzarella’s saxophone.
There’s also 'Pigeons', from Gold Record, which keeps Callahan’s introduction as Johnny Cash (he also signs off as L. Cohen).
Those name drops may acknowledge his place in a certain pantheon of singer-songwriters, but I think he’s mainly being cheeky about his deep voice.
His songs tend to sound serious, but like the Bruce Banner reference, he’s often slyly silly.
The earliest here is ‘Keep Some Steady Friends Around’, initially released under the Smog moniker, playfully profound while dispensing friendly advice.
Tracks on Resuscitate! average around six or seven minutes, with the longest over 12. The focus is on interplay between band members, as tracks wax as wane dynamically, swelling and receding.
Bill Callahan’s songs are often hypnotic, and, aside from the odd dip into abstract noise, that’s amplified here. Zoning out is, I think, entirely appropriate.