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Bill Callahan is one of those serious songwriters. Sure, he tells jokes, and his songs often rely on what you might call comic timing. But his songwriting has a Message and a Truth. It’s Big, and it’s Clever. He’s Leonard Cohen with Paul Auster’s self-knowing postmodernism and Johnny Cash’s charred heart. If you look back over his (frankly astonishing) recording history, you can trace, through his lyrical preoccupations, something like a conventional career trajectory. But what we sometimes forget about Callahan is the music. In recent years, he has surrounded himself with some of the best musicians on the avant-garde and experimental folk scenes, and the results of these collaborations are often best appreciated in a live setting.
So Resuscitate! is a welcome gift. It was recorded last year in Chicago and predominantly features tracks from his most recent album, YTILAER. But this isn’t any old live album. It shows Callahan as a bandleader and musical enabler, encouraging his songs to mutate, sometimes almost beyond recognition, with a small but stellar cast of musicians teasing out new nuances with practically every note. On many of these tracks, Dustin Laurenzi’s sax is foregrounded, so Coyotes, for example, begins with an extended instrumental section which reaches back into Albert Ayler territory while Matt Kinsey and Callahan’s guitars press on underneath like a crazier Crazy Horse. It pushes the song out towards the thirteen-minute mark, but you hardly notice.
The fluttering opening of First Bird – which here, as on YTILAER, is the first track – plays with a kind of spiritual jazz vibe and lurches forward on Jim White’s subtle but propulsive percussion. It’s a far cry from the gentle acoustic strum of the album version. Partition is striving and itchy from the outset, built on a high-wire one-note rhythm guitar. Spiky lead lines and Callahan’s occasional vocal whoops fire off it like sparks from a Catherine wheel. Everyway takes on an immersive aspect, the song unfolding over a fluid soundscape. Naked Souls begins gently enough, with a brush of drums and a slow, searching guitar, but soon morphs into a kind of dark, righteous soul.
The non-YTILAER tracks are no less inspired. Keep Some Steady Friends Around – from 2001’s Rain On Lens, back when Callahan was still Smog – is almost disconcerting in its intimacy, coming as it does after the vibrant and rangy Coyotes. The sax, hand drums and voice combine to give the whole thing the air of a confession made late at night in a dive bar or on a front porch. Drover, a highlight from 2011’s Apocalypse, benefits from Kinsey’s squally guitar and White’s insistent drumming. On Pigeons, from 2020’s Gold Record, Callahan relates existential advice from the point of view of a wedding limo driver. It’s one of his recent masterpieces, funny and heartbreaking and life-affirming all at once, and here it is given space to meander into the collective subconscious of the audience. A hush and a reverence surrounds this part of an otherwise pretty noisy set.
Despite being a very condensed version of the gig that spawned it, Resuscitate! grows and intensifies like all the best live shows. This kind of performance gives the musicians licence to evolve their work in real-time. Where Callahan’s solo work of late has been, well, if not exactly streamlined, then defined by a certain minimalism, here the finished product is decorated with unexpected bumps and bulges. Natural Information, for example, allows for passages of snaky guitar and gives White space to indulge in some of his rockiest drumming. Chicago avant-garde legends Joshua Abrams and Lisa Alvarado – aka Natural Information Society – are also given some stage time, and the song dissolves, gloriously and messily, into free jazz-folk jamming. Closer Planets follows a similar path, melting itself down into a stream of musical consciousness that the Art Ensemble of Chicago would have been proud of. Good fun, it seems, was had by all, and fun is infectious: it’s hard to walk away from this album without a smile on your face. Exploratory and constantly changing, Resuscitate! is serious music that doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Bandcamp: https://billcallahan.bandcamp.com/album/resuscitate
Resuscitate! (26th July 2024) Drag City
