Forgotten Foundation is a reissue of Smog's clangorous second album. For newer listeners, it should be stressed that young Bill Callahan was very different from the mellow miniaturist of Supper and A River Ain't Too Much to Love. This is Smog at his lo-fiest and no-waviest, his most misogynistic and malicious. If you dislike the bookends of Accumulation: None, the distortion-drenched echo chamber "Astronaut" and the toneless no-fi dirge "Hole in the Heart", you should steer clear of Forgotten Foundation. But if you find those songs strangely magnetic for their sheer contrariness, and wonder how the competent, tranquil Smog of today earned his reputation for musical and lyrical malice, you'd do well to begin here.
If you could get the taciturn singer to give a reason for deliberately releasing evil into the world, it's probable that the answer would come as a shrug: Because it is possible to do so. What are we to make of "Evil Tyrant"? "He saw the most beautiful girl on the island/ He knew that raping her was not the best way to impress her," Smog deadpans over a primitive beat and disjointed guitar runs. Or the sneered innuendo of the crashing "97th Street": "Put a little bit of the city right in your mouth." Is this social satire, or is Smog just an unsavory character? Why do we tend to interperet such stuff more favorably when it comes dressed in indie sackcloth instead of pop velour? Does he mean it, or is he investigating possibilities of expression simply because they exist? Even if they aren't confessional, what drives a person to make up such mean-spirited stories without the mitigating factor of moral judgment?
Charitably, one imagines that Smog is bravely magnifying aspects of his psyche that many artists, in their quest to be liked, conceal, and that these are exactly the sort of questions his nastier efforts are intended to raise. Less charitably, he's just mean, and while one wants to group him with Bret Easton Ellis, Michel Houellebecq, and the Frogs, it's quite possible that the distinction between this camp's misanthropy and 50 Cent's is specious. While some of the songs have intrinsic musical interest-- "Guitar Innovator" is a gem, as Smog tape-splices heavily distorted vocal ejaculations into a sort of monstrously thrumming rhythmic engine-- many seek no end but dread, or, at best, an interested repulsion. It's the "why" and "should" of its existence that make Forgotten Foundation compelling, more of a theoretical gambit than a confessional one. We hope.
