For over twenty years, Bill Callahan has been finding devious new ways of defying expectations. Whether playing the role of the lo-fi pioneer, the boisterous noise-making prankster, or the darkly smirking balladeer, Callahan has always made music brimming with tension and complexity. When Callahan is at his best, a squealing, distorted guitar can break your heart, a rumination on death can make you laugh, and a joke can make you hate yourself. In a sense, Callahan's best work is often the most difficult to listen to-- a tapestry of revelation, humor, despair, beauty, and noise hardly qualifies as easy listening.
Supper, Callahan's eleventh proper album as Smog, is a lovely collection of songs. Alternating between confident mid-tempo rockers and acoustic portraits of domestic bliss, this is without doubt one of his most accessible efforts to date. Which is exactly why it's not his best. Though certainly not a bad album, Supper lacks the unique, often disturbing touch that makes the best of Callahan's work so compelling. And though the more subversive side of Callahan's songwriting does occasionally manifest itself in more subdued ways, it's not enough to render the album anything more than pleasant.
Callahan opens Supper with "Feather by Feather", a song that bears a striking resemblance to the works of Drag City labelmate Will Oldham. In fact, Oldham's Master and Everyone serves as a good point of reference for the more whimsical side of this record. Master and Everyone marked an even more pronounced shift away from both the sparse, chilling sound of Oldham's I See a Darkness than 2001's Ease Down the Road, as well as from Oldham's preferred lyrical themes of sex, death and having sex with Death. As a result, Master and Everyone was prettier, but also more reliant on traditional signifiers of "pretty" than on Oldham's unique musical vocabulary. Similarly, Supper suppresses both Callahan's talent for off-kilter instrumentation and production and his tendency towards understated, absurd and darkly comic wordplay in favor of female vocals and clichéd slide guitar.
Still, "Feather by Feather"-- along with "Vessel in Vain", "Truth Serum" and "Our Anniversary"-- stands as a fine entry in the Smog oeuvre. Callahan's Hammond organ, Ken Champion's pedal steel and Sarabeth Tucek's breathy backing vocals combine to paint the very same portrait of subdued domesticity that Oldham seemed to be working towards on Master and Everyone. Sadly, a close examination of this portrait reveals paint-by-numbers outlines faintly detectable behind the color and texture of Callahan's unique baritone.
Though by no means brilliant, the more subdued acoustic tracks on Supper are vastly superior to its bland, awkward electric rockers. As the BBC Session recording of "I Break Horses" featured in this year's singles compilation Accumulation: None clearly demonstrated, Callahan is more than capable of carrying off some of his most engaging work with a full band rocking out behind him; the track showed Callahan seemingly swept up in the band's energy, his cold voice sounding both heartless and heartbroken. The heavier numbers on Supper, however, simply drop Callahan's disaffected voice over displaced Rolling Stones-isms. Jim O'Rourke's Insignificance proved that such a formula can yield incredible results when executed with wit and finesse, but here, the awkwardness that makes much of Callahan's music so heartrending doesn't always work in his favor.
Regardless, Supper is not without strong moments. The album's last tracks, "Driving" and "A Guiding Light", actually break from the disappointingly formulaic sound that Callahan utilizes for the album's majority. "Driving" turns the record's serene acoustic arrangements into something chaotic, layering plucked banjo and sparse, arrhythmic drumming atop occasional flourishes of warm, clean electric guitar. As the song progresses, it seems to become both more structured and overwhelming, as its ever-expanding stratum seems to congeal into a more regular pattern. "A Guiding Light" most closely resembles the Smog of days past, with Callahan's chilling voice accompanied only by a haunting, repetitive guitar figure and minimal percussion. Unfortunately, even these two relatively strong songs don't hold a candle to the greatest in Smog's back catalog.
Throughout his career, Callahan has managed to wear many aesthetic masks while still coming through with something unique and interesting. At his best, he's evoked vivid, complex imagery with a single well-placed word or sound. It would be nice to say that he simply hides behind the machinations of docile country-folk and steady riff-rock on Supper to more insidiously convey his distinctively dark musical sense. But I get the distinct impression that all of Callahan's cards are on the table here-- where beneath the instrumentation there once lied depth and cutting truth, there is now only complacency.
