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Bill Callahan’s first album sans Smog is a predictably polarizing affair. For an artist who helped defined lo-fi throughout the nineties, and whose 2005 release A River Ain’t Too Much to Love was one of the best folk albums of the year, Whaleheart is jarringly produced by Neil Michael Hagerty. Driven by big beats, jangly electric guitars, and swelling violin courtesy of Elizabeth Warren, the album justifies Callahan’s dropping of his former brand name, and the new direction, however unsettling at first, promises a new path that may open up some of his best work, even if alienating some fans.
As Callahan noted in our recent interview with him, there is a large element of the album that returns to familiar themes, yet looks at them in new light. The obvious play from his last album’s intensity of water imagery here manifests itself as an inviting and enveloping wave, epitomized in the opening track “From the Rivers to the Ocean.” Callahan’s call to “have faith in wordless knowledge” and that “I could tell you about the river or we could just get in” resounds like a manifesto for release and abandon. And the song is rife with a growth from past to present, one that sees Callahan finally free from the ponderous circular questioning that seems to have mired a self-realization in his past work: “the city was a fist, I lived on its wrist, and I took myself a good long look around / and the river grew higher and wider, deeper and darker as it was closing in, and it led me to you, which led me to say, ‘let’s get in.’”
The rewriting of former visions also occurs on the stunning final song, “A Man Needs a Woman or a Man to be a Man.” Aside from the concession to living beyond the solipsistic absorption that permeated albums like The Doctor Came at Dawn with an obsessed, sometimes violent, paranoia towards relationships, the song offers an acceptance of lack and need and, in doing so, actually finds its fulfillment. And if Callahan’s sense of humor was previously somewhat lost amid the brooding, Whaleheart inverts the balance behind the upbeat, loping rhythms. His playful summons of “learn from the animals, monkey’s do piggish things too” on “Day,” or even the closer’s exclamation of “It’s pretty womanly in here!” are not necessarily uncharacteristic, but have never been so blatantly joyous and lighthearted.
It’s tempting to hear much of the album and it’s new outlook as a implication of Callahan’s highly publicized, at least in indie circles, relationship with Joanna Newsom, and while “Diamond Dancer” and “Honeymoon Child” almost insist on the acknowledgement, the album takes its power not from the exploration of love, but from a general openness with the world as whole. The songs are filled with a wonder as if seeing things for the first time, as on the beautifully tender “Night” when Callahan concedes “We stand under it but we don’t understand it.” “Sycamore,” meanwhile, stands out on the album as an amalgamation of much of Whaleheart’s brilliance, a literate narrative perfectly blended with the climbing musical lilt as the song seems to impart timeless, cryptic wisdom of exploration and determination.
But the album may be best realized, appropriately, in words not spoken. On the final page of the liner notes, Callahan writes simply: “Remember: A dream is only as long as the swimmer’s stroke. Peace.” And there is peace in that acquiescence, in the relief of the endless flow and its cleansing wash.
Mp3 from Woke On a Whaleheart:
Sycamore
