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Rating: "Wild love/Wild love/Somebody shot down my wild love" sings Smog (aka Bill Callahan) in the title-track. And more than a song, it's a declamation in the desert filled with barely contained nostalgia, more than a piece, it's a sketch barely outlined on a makeshift canvas.
And both the declamation and the sketch are the perfect synthesis of "Wild Love," the album.
Yes, because this wild love that Smog claims was shot down by someone, you can bet he never really experienced it.
That's why he declaims because the object of his regret doesn't have the clear, precise contours of a truly lived memory; it cannot be evoked from the secure paths of a melody. Smog's nostalgia is archetypal, existential, a nostalgia for the Lost Paradise.
Hence the sketch and the makeshift canvas because you can't fully develop something that is "just" an innate feeling, and ultimately, the surface on which you want to express it doesn't matter.
A good two-thirds of the album have this stylistic hallmark: trembling dreamlike vignettes by candlelight, disorienting march tunes led by the pace of naive keyboards, melancholic soliloquies triggered by O'Rourke's cello. Vignettes that rarely reach two minutes, marbles just roughly hewn by a raw lo-fi production, barely suggested gestures that refer to the world of possibilities.
Above all, dominates Smog's decadent and solitary attitude. A dry, lean voice but with a heart-wrenching undertone, a voice that seems to be the result of a strange oxymoron in which Lou Reed's glassy nihilism is balanced by Nick Drake's profound empathy and fragility; all immersed in a laid-back a-la Pavement atmosphere.
In the - few - more complex tracks, our artist tries to shake off the torpor. Genuine electric awakenings in which dense guitar crossings, dramatic compositions of complex orchestrations, skewed riffs and driving rhythm give life to dark and sinister outbursts that are like the last life spasms of a dying man, the last sudden leap of a paralytic.
The repressed and suddenly unleashed anger, the desire to live that headbutts the walls and the surprising heterogeneity of "Julius Caesar" - for me the true masterpiece of Smog - in "Wild Love" seem surpassed, annihilated, definitively dormant.
Bill Callahan has lost all illusion and has nothing left but to survive in a world that is long dead and buried, a world that is now perhaps just an imagined memory, a world where he had experienced a wild love.
Tracklist Lyrics Samples and Videos
02 Wild Love (01:35)
Wild love
Wild love
Somebody chopped down my wild love
Wild love
Wild love
Somebody shot down my wild love
08 Sleepy Joe (03:53)
I slept through most of April
I got up in May and had some toast
Then I bedded down again
I bedded down again
Because I was sleepy
In June
I made enough chili in my crockpot
To last `till the winter
'Cause winter will be here sooner than you think
Winter will be here sooner than you think
That's when I hibernate
Oh, can you hear the bells
Can you hear the bells
Well neither can I
Neither can I
And I don't hear trumpets
When I enter a room
The fire you build for yourself
Could be so cold
Sleepy Joe
Sleepy Joe
Sleepy Joe
You say you feel like you're dead
Oh well, I think it's just those books you read
You say you can't feel a thing
I'd like to break a chair across your back
And throw you in the ocean
Then tell me you don't feel a thing
When you slept with Jenny
You said you couldn't feel a thing
Well I did
Sleepy Joe
Sleepy Joe
Sleepy Joe
Nature abhors a vacuum
Nature abhors a vacuum
And so do you
Especially when you're trying to sleep late
Sleepy Joe
Sleepy Joe
Sleepy Joe
Sleepy Joe
09 The Candle (02:26)
I was on her body
He was on her mind
I progressed her
He possessed her
I was there every day
He was there one day
And then went away
Well, I'm gathering these splinters to make a raft someday
She gives me so little
I'm gathering these splinters to make a raft someday and sail away
But the candle, she still burns a candle
"A light", she says, "I need a light"
And it's the only light in our room tonight
And she fills her face
With bananas and plumbs
Yoghurt and crumbs
And sexual (drums her fingers, comes, numbs?)
And the vibrated ..?..
And my dumb smile
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By egebamyasi
His sound is raw, rough, sharp, "low-fi", the perfect landscape for Callahan’s beautiful baritone voice.
Bathysphere is the epitome of the artist Smog, trapping the listener in a state of tremendously fascinating claustrophobic anxiety.
