Recently, my mind has been occupied with the knowledge that death is not only inevitable, but can occur at any time. I could get hit by a car while crossing a street tomorrow. I could choke on my daily scuz-deli chicken cutlet sandwich. More likely still, I could get e-coli from my daily scuz-deli chicken cutlet sandwich. The bottom line is, we're all treading on thin ice. I'm going to die, you're going to die, and there's absolutely nothing we can do about it.
Enter Bill Callahan's latest Smog opus, Dongs of Sevotion, to make me even more insecure about my mortality. See, thoughts of death can linger, but they can also be displaced. A song, on the other hand, can remain lodged in one's brain like a hairball in a sink drain. And Dongs of Sevotion is just brimming with the kind of unsettling tunes that remain skull-trapped for days on end, like dreams in the back of your mind. Over the past few weeks, I've found myself returning to Dongs of Sevotion just to stop myself from replaying it internally. The chanting cheerleaders on "Bloodflow", the impeccably placed piano riff on "Easily Led"-- these are the kind of things that see repeat play deep in the recesses of your mind, reminding you of your imminent demise whether you like it or not.
Dongs of Sevotion's opening track, "Justice Aversion", sounds like it could have been lifted directly off last year's brilliant Knock Knock. But, whereas Knock Knock saw Bill Callahan slipping in and out of the personas of prison security guards and teenage spaceships, Dongs takes a less schizophrenic approach to the inner workings of this guy's mind. Instead, the album tills the always-fertile topics of sex and death, coupling them with hypnotic six-minute dirges of sparse piano, guitar, and percussion. Every note and every word here has its purpose.
I could fill a whole review with choice quotes from this album. In "Nineteen," Callahan mutters: "Without her clothes she looked like a leper in the snow/ I left her in the snow/ Without her clothes." On "Cold Discovery", he mumbles: "I can hold a woman/ Down on a hardwood floor/ And her teeth can gnash right through me/ Looking for a soft place." I could keep going; every track on Dongs of Sevotion is chock-full of some of the most poignant, disconcerting lyrics you should ever have to hear. And Callahan's voice makes it all the more disquieting. It's as if the guy's dishing out his brains, thought by shameful thought, and feeding it to you with a baby spoon.
It's also worth noting that Dongs of Sevotion has one of the single greatest closers I've ever heard. The final track, "Permanent Smile", couples an ethereal, ever-repeating piano theme with a few absolutely huge-sounding percussive hits. This, while Callahan croons: "Seven waves of insects make families in my skin/ It's just like animals at play/ And the flesh rotted off my skull/ And then I will have earned my permanent smile/ Oh, God, I never, never ask why." And just as you find yourself lulled into a trance by the boundless ocean of sound, everything stops suddenly. The reassuring piano melody that has played uninterrupted since the track's opening comes to an unexpected halt, its final note echoing through your cranium like some cerebral church bell. And trust me, it's an awfully scary moment. All the thoughts, fears, and worries that have surfaced in you over the record's duration come to an overwhelming climax. I don't know what sudden death is like, but I would imagine it's quite akin to the final seconds of this album.
Over the course of his prolific career, Bill Callahan has wrapped himself in an almost Hamlet-like enigma. Is he really a tortured soul, destined to be plagued by violent memories, fear of death, and an overly potent imagination? Or is he just a master of disguise, a man with such a proficiency in the language of human emotion that he can draw hopes, dreams, fears, and defeats from the well of human experience, and seamlessly weave them together into a work all his own? I don't know. But I do know that Callahan has cemented his place among America's finest dongwriters.
