Like pal and labelmate Will Oldham, Bill Callahan has spent much of the last decade shrouded in quasi-anonymity, recording under the guise of Smog, or most recently, (smog). Appropriately, Woke on a Whaleheart, Callahan's first release under his birth name, is also his least explicitly experimental. Anchored by Callahan's deep, loping pipes and rich string arrangements courtesy of Royal Trux's Neil Michael Hagerty (who also co-produced), the album is a relatively straightforward collage of country, folk, and classic Austin indie.
Callahan may finally be stepping into his own name, but in both narrative and sound, Woke on a Whaleheart is insistently vague, riddled with half-thoughts and muddled images. Accordingly, opener "From the River to the Ocean" flatly implores us to "have faith in wordless knowledge"-- to submit to the nebulous truth inherent to all big things (see: love, nature, and death). Whaleheart's instrumentation follows suit, meandering and slack, with bits of piano and percussion, twisty guitars, and itinerant melodies. Imprecision is hardly the backbone of great art, but it's still strangely easy to be seduced by Callahan's cloud, and if you can learn how to listen to his loose, flowing stories without scouring the sky for a payoff, there are plenty of bits to enjoy here.
Lyrically, themes range from banal (in "A Man Needs a Woman or a Man to be a Man", Callahan finds his rose-addled bedroom kinda girly, declaring "It's pretty womanly in here!") to metaphysical (in single "Diamond Dancer", a girl dances herself into a diamond, "doing the thing as she dreamed it.") The jangly, sweet-faced "Sycamore" finds Callahan crowing hard about the cycle of life over tinny guitar and light drums: "He taught me to love in the wild and fight in a gym/ He taught me the bottle gives birth to the cup/ And you won't get hurt if you just keep your hands up/ And stand tall/ Like Sycamore."
Callahan's voice, meanwhile, is thick and precise, tempered only by the smallest hints of grit-- on "The Wheel" he channels Outlaw composure, sounding like a cross between Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings with all his round sounds and bellows. The track even features gospel-singer back-up (provided by the lovely Deani Pugh-Flemmings) and vaguely biblical spoken proclamations ("The wheel has turned one full circle/ Time for my meal of wood").
Woke on a Whaleheart is a deceptively easy listen-- steady, lulling, and vehemently organic-- but consequently, it can begin to feel invisible. Sound fades into sound, until silence is noise. Still, it's hardly facile: Violinist Elizabeth Warren and guitarist Pete Denton make sparks, and various other players dip in and out, offering Wurlitzer, found sounds, Farfisa, lap steel, glockenspiel, and Hammond organ. Callahan may have ditched the instrumental, uber lo-fi methodology of his earliest days, but Woke on a Whaleheart is still a fully realized event, if not necessarily a game-changing one.
