Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle
With one of music’s most deadpanned vocal deliveries, Bill Callahan, who performed for years as Smog, often sounds like an outside observer even when fully immersed in the action around him. It allows him to pursue the poetry of the moment and make it feel as if he’s a cinematographer simply recording the events unfolding. It also allows him to deliver lines that could be punchlines served up as straightlines and vice versa. Callahan doesn’t give much away; he sounds like the voice of reason even as he admits he isn’t sure where the creative lines are being drawn. “Eid Ma Clack Shaw” features a nonsensical chorus since the one he dreamed that was “the perfect song/ that held all the answers” apparently got lost in translation. The music on *Eagle* is rich and orchestrated, settling on quiet moments where pianos, bass guitar and Callahan’s deep vocal strains add ominous turns of events. The dark finality of “The Wind and the Dove” uses strings and downcast chords. “Rococo Zephyr” adds touches of acoustic guitar and simple rolling rhythms. It it\'s music to sedate the body as a world of contemplation opens before us.
First whales, now eagles. The man of Smog has really taken to this nature thing and we're digging it, too! Fancy (and fanciful) arrangements give the perfect highlights to Bill's deep rumbler of a voice on this second outing under his "new" name.
Bill Callahan's second post-Smog album feels unusually intimate and contains some of the most varied arrangements of his career.
In 2007, Woke On A Whaleheart not only signified the emergence of Bill Callahan from the hazy alias Smog, it was a sea change in spirit. The collection was stylistically scattershot—the first to feature music completely arranged by a second party, Neil Hagerty—and lyrically upbeat, a quality which theretofore wouldn’t…
The artist formerly known as Smog's thirteenth album in total, but his second under his given name, sees him reach an unsteady maturity.
When Bill Callahan left behind his long held Smog moniker, he gave longtime fans of his lo-fi, mopey, sometimes angry aesthetic some real cause for worry: there was not only the name change, but the reliance on more technology that began with the Diamond Dancer EP and the outright lush production (compared to his past work) on Woke on a Whaleheart.
<p>This miraculous return to form finds the artist formerly known as Smog losing his girl, but rediscovering his mojo, writes <strong>Ben Thompson</strong></p>
Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle once again proves Bill Callahan to be as ageless as the forest.
“I started telling the story without knowing the end,” Bill Callahan intones on “Jim Cain”, setting the table for Sometimes I Wish We Were an...
Bill Callahan - Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle review: Internet conversational techniques perplex me.