anticipate APOCALYPSE, the new bill callahan record

Oh yeah, so like I said on the other thread I realized this album is amazing. I actually bought it mainly because the record store clerk was cute and playing it, but it's amazing.

would smog clerk

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/650397224/apocalypse-a-bill-callahan-tour-film

Anyone else pledge? Seems an unlikely subject for a tour film, Bill being famously reticent and all, but what do I know? I just wish there was an actual, you know, DVD. Ah well. I pledged for the mix CD. That's gonna be awesome.

http://americansongbook.org/pdfs/2012/AS-2012-02-08-Callahan.pdf

lol @ Thursday, February 9, at 8:30
tUnE-yArDs

ha that program is classic

So that concert film/road doc is finished. Saw it in Baltimore this past weekend with the director and Bill in attendance. It was quite good! She caught some beautiful footage. Bill played a nice short little set after the screening. I’m assuming there will be a DVD/BluRay release at some point in the not-do-distant future.

#217 of my 1,000 favorite moments on this record:

that quiet, brief laugh he does at 3:56 in "universal applicant" ---- "the flare burned and fell / the boat burned as well, hm!"

bees only swarm when they're looking for a home
...and so i followed them!

#218

"to be free in bad times... and good"

IF this record has 1000 moments, Eagle has 100,000.

Both Eagle and Apocalypse are favourites of mine but out of the two, I prefer the latter - more consistently excellent and for me the lyrics are the best Callahan has ever wrote.

this was the performance that convinced me that "america!" is the highlight, not the goofy outlier, of this album:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwaiE9nZWCk

incredible record and cannae wait for the new one

ne too but i hope it will be better than Apocalypse

nobody does not hope that but we can still be fond of apocalypse all the same

waking up tremulously anxious to hear this every day btw

Apocalypse is his best album.

that's going a little far but there's absolutely nothing wrong w/it

it's not one of my fave callahans but seeing him live on this circuit helped me appreciate it more

i do not generally care for, or at least don't automatically prioritise, shows, but he does something so special, live, i think, like it plays to a strand of his music, to do with timing & tension, that makes it even more itself, in a kinda extra-dimensional way. it becomes ... ultra-smog.

yeah - and more simply for me, you notice how good a guitarist he is, how much he's doing in those economical little turnarounds

it is interesting seeing the new song to know it's another of his kinda woven into a simple, rolling line, like it has the DNA of to be of use or all thoughts are pray to some beast. I think there was definitely a moment (like around a river?) when he seemed to step up & sorta click more with what a guitar could do propulsively, how it could be momentum for him to sing with or else play against, pitching his hesitation against its flow on the well or whatever. I'm curious to hear the arrangements for the new record (which I hear are pretty jazzy/loose), because I generally can't neatly assign a register or style he's working in , now - that he is amid this kinda syrupy late flowering, & playing with these sorta austere & delicate classical sounds seems to mean people are calling him glen campbell or picking up on his mickey newman affection, but it isn't that, to me. I feel like he's doing everything very minimally & then dressing it up well.

he's always been kind of a minimalist, arrangement-wise, and he's always been good live with these kind of steady vamps whose dynamics shift in subtle ways. i've admired this about his live shows since... probably the red apple falls era. he's just got better since.

"it is interesting seeing the new song to know it's another of his kinda woven into a simple, rolling line"

you mean the song he played live in the NYC park?

i'm not sure it will sound the same on the record. maybe it won't be as simple.

no, sure. but that it's a reducible, cyclic thing, though, right? i was trying to find an old youtube of him playing all thoughts, solo, the same kinda thing, & can't. i'm sure it'll be dressier on the record, but i think he is doing something kinda structurally minimal anyway.

yea i'm really excited about this new record. i don't know why but i'm imagining it to maybe be like the looser stuff on apocalypse (e.g. universal applicant or free's), perhaps b/c as schlump said there is some talk about the arrangements being a little jazzy/loose.

anyways i generally do fall into the camp that apocalypse is his best record so far. definitely his most consistent. and i've totally gone to appreciate "america" is a great feature of this album. not the highlight, for me that would probably be "one fine morning." but i really have a hard time picking the highlight because as i mentioned upthread this album has 1000 moments of brilliance and is all around just spectacular

i hope it WON'T be like Free's or Universal Applicant. i'll abandon the ship if that will be the case.
(i hope it will be his Aja lol!)

riding for the feeling is my personal highlight of Apocalypse, (maybe because it sounds like an Eagle track, which i adore)

riding for the feeling is wonderful

the song or the act itself?

Still sounds wonderful to me:

http://devonrecordclub.com/2014/09/20/bill-callahan-apocalypse-round-71-toms-selection/

I made a YouTube playlist of every live performance of "America!" I could find: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR4bkk16IAsi9_3BnQVB-SKtU956b5rsU

The first video is from a show I was at.

I don't really know why I did this, except that seeing the song performed live really opened it up for me. The album version is great but it's so heavy live.

you should make a supercut of every time he speak-sings "Leatherneck Jones"

What if Jenny Hval's "Apocalypse, girl" was a response album to this one

DC 450 oh, oh

This was a perfect soundtrack to washing up this evening.

I'm not sure of the meaning of "America", though. (I can't quite untangle the possibly dry humour).

I always took it as weighing the speaker's homesickness and affection for some aspects of American culture against the speaker's knowledge of the historical complicity of white Americans with genocide and imperialism, not really advancing an argument so much as exploring that affective dissonance.

i thought he was just being a smug child of privilege, bragging about chilling ironically carefree indie rock star style in australia, while you sad fucks have to get up and go to work LOL

And when my cattle turned on me, I was knocked. back. flat.
I was knocked out cold for one clack of the train track.
Then I rose, a colossal hand buried, buried in sand.
I rose like a drover.
For I am, in the end, a drover.