Smog
Wild Love

THE REVIEW

"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.