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Smog, the unappetising nom de plum of one Bill Callahan. Callahan's a singer-songwriter from the old school – picture a roaming troubador wandering along Route 66 with his thumb out, a beaten guitar slung over his back and a heart heavy with troubles. Troubles that nobody but God knows. Also, his woman left him. And his horse died. Makes you wanna squaredance, don't it?
Callahan's really not the squaredancing type. The new album finds him once more in the familiar, bleak territory of isolation and despair. Melancholic but humble, he strokes his guitar like a dying pet. Occasionally a few drops of piano or soft-brushed drums will underpin the sonorous musings about life, the universe, and everything, but this is really music at its very simplest: a voice, a guitar and an old, old soul. Smog's purpose has always been to express the kind of bruised tragedy that life always imparts upon its gentler inhabitants. “Why is everybody looking at me like there's something fundamentally wrawng?” he groans in the album's opening track, Palimpsest.
But hey, if Morrissey can make a living from gloomy self-indulgence there's no reason that Smog can't, too. The primary difference between them (genre and music aside, obviously) is that Morrissey insists that really, truly, nobody else can possibly know how he feels. Callahan seems to understand that everybody's felt what he feels at some point, and this is his way of expressing it. His metaphors are time-honoured and just shy of cliché, but there's enough breathing room in them to make a personal connection. “When the river dries, will you bury me in wood?” he asks, “Will you bury me in stone?” But he leaves you the space to make of the lyrics what you will.
Smog is a storyteller, a yarn spinner, a folk singer at a campfire. And his own story? “I bought this guitar to pledge my love.” And that really is the heart of it. Although steeped in the signs and symbols of American folk the topics he's singing about - from the pain of new alienation to teenage kicks – are something everyone can cleave to. Listening to Callahan's nostalgic reminscences sympathy and empathy become blurred, the hard line between audience and artist becomes smeared.
But it's definitely not for everybody. Smog's voice has echoes of Nick Cave's baritone, and his lyrics a flavour of Dave Pajo's alt.country, and 'A River Ain't Too Much Love' is a heavy, hard listen that commands full attention. "Hard to get to know, and near impossible to forget," in Callahan's own words. And, although he then apologises for his egotism, he's absolutely right.
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