Blowin' Indie Wind (Smog)'s Mysterious Lyrics Fragmented Yet Emotionally Whole

Author: Erika Mercer

It's like passing by a closed bedroom door, overhearing a conversation from within the room. You don't know who the people talking are, and you know you shouldn't be listening in, but the phrases you gather are too intense and intriguing to turn your ear away.
The conversation is a fractured assemblage of thoughts and confessions, hesitantly spoken and acutely private — a chronologically jumbled, oddly interconnected series of emotions and anecdotes. Still, though you listen until the conversation lulls, the topic of conversation and the overarching emotions remain untold and indiscernible. You continue past the shut door, charmed by your glimpse into another mysterious psyche, confused and dissatisfied by your inability to make sense out of the ambiguity.
And what's more ambiguous than the alias, (Smog), is the hazy name behind which singer/songwriter Bill Callahan lurks. His fetish for parentheses adds to the vagueness surrounding his persona and extends to his music and lyrics: He constantly gives the listener only what is inside the parenthesis but leaves them guessing as to what the rest of the sentence addresses. His fractured, parenthetical thoughts elude the main stories, giving his music a mysterious, intangible quality.
Callahan first bared his soul in 1988 with the album "Macrame Gunplay," released cassette-only on his own label, Disaster, and within the next two years he released three other cassettes, most notably "Cow" in 1989. Though much more sparse and unrefined than his later work, these cassette releases paved the way for Callahan's underground success and for the lo-fi indie-folk movement as a whole (though Callahan himself professes to "have no allegiance to any movement or aesthetic").
In 1991, (Smog) released the EP "Floating" on the Chicago-based label, Drag City, followed by the full-length albums "Forgotten Foundation" and "Julius Caesar" in 1992 and 1993 respectively. For the the latter album, he collaborated with artists Cynthia Dall and Jim O'Rourke and used instruments such as violin, banjo and cello. These releases illustrated Callahan's progression toward a slightly more conventional and a much more melodious sound, while still employing his characteristic samplings of seemingly arbitrary noises, his scratchy, often abrasive instrumentation and his disjointed, evocative lyrics.
This progression has continued over the past 10 years, in which Callahan released some of his most acclaimed albums, including "Wild Love" (1995), "Red Apple Falls" (1997), "Knock Knock" (1999) and "Rain On Lens" (2001). For each album, Callahan gathered an assortment of hand-picked musicians to play with him and help him produce and record, accounting for the unique and varying styles and sounds of each individual release.
In November, (Smog) released the album "Accumulation: None," a collection of singles, radio sessions and previously unreleased or obscure material. Though chosen from over 10 years' worth of work (1991-2002) and from many different albums and sessions, "Accumulation: None" is remarkably cohesive and substantial. Through Callahan's trademark minimalist instrumentation and stripped-down vocals, hypnotic lyrics and unsettling piecing together of noises, he creates a collection of songs that provide accurate insight into (Smog)'s work over the past decade.
Callahan purposely confuses the chronology of the songs, crafting an album whose disorder mirrors his own splintered, disarrayed thoughts. For example, on the song "Came Blue," originally released in 1997 on the 7" album, "Hausmusik," Callahan sings, "Your eyes are drunk / real drunk / why don't you close them / like I pictured you to do / I came blue / 27 years / there's still a hunger." Cryptic, truncated phrases with short staccato endings, painfully intimate lyrics that border on self-obsession and creepiness, a melancholy, soulful tone: all of these are apparent within a few brief lines of one song.
On "Accumulation: None," Callahan constantly makes the listener feel as though they are surreptitiously glancing at a stranger's diary: "How can I stand and laugh with the man / who re-defined your body?" He pushes extremes, testing just how much his listeners can bare before reaching their limit and turning off the music — and yet he relents just before that limit is reached, giving his music a heady and spine-tingling quality. For exactly this reason, Callahan has been viewed by critics as "a songwriter revered for his close kinship to the world of pathos."
"Accumulation: None" is a terrifying, exciting, mysterious collection of songs that constantly hint at and elude to but never address any topic: It is the overheard snippets of conversation, the guilty and gripping feeling of listening in on something secret and disturbing. It is 10 years' worth of sentence fragments and indefinable emotions, all spoken through a mask, through an alias.

(Smog) will perform at the College this Friday night, Nov. 22 in the Adirondack Coltrane Lounge. The show is free and opened by Brother JT3. Doors open at 8:00 p.m., and space is limited.