Sincerity is way overrated. Those who seek confessional truth and honesty in music forget just how inane, obnoxious, and exhibitionistic most people who are prone to confessional honesty often are. Anybody can go through the kind of emotions that are all too frequently expressed with weak, dime-a-dozen clichés. In many cases, the people with the most interesting minds are those who keep themselves guarded, confessing only to themselves, and keeping all their thoughts contained well within the confines of their own minds.
As a songwriter, Bill Callahan is about as far from this type of confessional honesty as you're likely to get. Rather than telling you more than you could ever hope to know, Callahan's records as Smog provide a tiny glimpse into a brilliant, interesting, and very guarded mind. Sure, a good deal of Bill Callahan's music is dark to point of ridiculousness, and obviously not based on any kind of personal experience. But that dark, often immensely witty silliness undoubtedly reflects a side of Callahan himself.
Last year's Dongs of Sevotion seemed to be a step towards a more somber, sparse, possibly genuine sound. "Permanent Smile", perhaps the most moving song Callahan has ever recorded, epitomized this, facing the very real issue of death with wise resignation. As one could expect from an album with the word "dong" in the title, parts of that album-- such as "Dress Sexy at My Funeral"-- were darkly hilarious. But even with this underlying sense of humorous insincerity, or perhaps mocking oversincerity, the album's close, skeletal sound helped make it sound very personal. That grim humor is certainly not the stuff of typical confessional songwriting, but one certainly got a sense that it's the stuff of Bill Callahan.
With Rain on Lens, Callahan seems to have turned almost completely away from more understated, tenuous sound of Dongs of Sevotion. Backed by Eleventh Dream Day's Rick Rizzo and U.S. Maple guitarist Pat Samson, a lot of the space that existed on previous Smog records is now filled. As a result, the tension that once marked Smog's sound has seriously eroded. There's no sense of a spatial void needing to be filled-- no sense of that odd, claustrophobic nearness that can come from silence. Because of this, much of Rain on Lens sounds remarkably detached, and the end result is an album that, while musically excellent, lacks the impact of pre-parentheses Smog.
The first installment of a two-part title track opens Rain on Lens promisingly enough. Reverb-soaked, trebly guitars ring distant minor chords as a bare-bones drumbeat lends the song a subtle pulse. Strings echo the guitars, as more wonderfully ambiguous guitar sounds enter the picture. Callahan's spare, understated vocals lends themselves perfectly to the track. Unfortunately, the briefness of "Rain on Lens 1" (a mere 1:27 in length) doesn't hold up well against the more substantial runtime of weaker tracks to follow.
And those weaker tracks hit instantly. "Song" embodies all that's cold and distant about Rain on Lens, relying on an overly repetitive, dense guitar and bass riff, with no real semblance of emotion or wit. Rather than developing over time, "Song" just seems to ride along on the same endless tick-tock beat and pentatonic guitar plunking. There's absolutely no motion in the track-- nothing to make you wonder, or care to wonder, what might happen next. Repetition can be a very powerful thing if it builds to some kind of hypnosis or bliss, but "Song" in no way benefits from it and comes across as purely boring.
"Natural Decline" suffers from some of the same problems affecting "Song", often relying for too long on frustratingly uninteresting repetition. Unlike its predecessor, though, "Natural Decline" does brew some wonderful musical tension. As Callahan deadpans, "Or is it just the natural decline/ Of the body," the music beneath him shifts into a beautifully unresolved, relatively dissonant chord-- a much needed moment of sonic conflict.
Both "Keep Some Steady Friends Around" and "Dirty Pants" are similarly repetitive, but benefit from much stronger material. The latter, more than any other song on Rain on Lens, uses repetition to its advantage, building a gritty minor-chord dirge. What's more, the song actually undergoes a significant change in the middle. Given the extent to which this enhances the track, one can only imagine what some more dynamic songwriting could have done for the album as a whole.
And when taken as a whole, Rain on Lens is certainly a good album. While the music is at times distant and bland, there's enough worthwhile material here to make for an enjoyable listen. What's truly missing is that little glimpse of something else-- that extra bit of dark personal insight that makes Bill Callahan's songwriting so interesting. Sincerity may be overrated, but personality certainly is not.
