Because the twentieth century tripped into the brand new millennium, darkish vitality rippled by the universe that Invoice Callahan had dreamed into being. The music he’d spent the earlier decade creating as Smog had maintained a tenuous stability of bleak magnificence and wry humor. Then, for a minute there, with 1999’s revelatory Knock Knock—a breakup document and a finding-himself document that featured a few of the most unburdened songwriting of his profession—it appeared like perhaps he’d turned a nook, tamed some demons. “For the primary time in my life/I’m shifting away shifting away shifting away/From throughout the attain of me,” he sang on “Held,” as if the speaker’s soul was a Mylar balloon escaping the white-knuckled fist of a bitter, stunted man-child.
However gravity’s a hell of a drag, and with 2000’s Dongs of Sevotion and 2001’s Rain on Lens, Callahan was again down within the muck together with his traditional solid of characters: disappointing siblings, obsessive nihilists, ambivalent shut-ins, and, above all, unreliable males with damaged ethical compasses. In December 2001, wrapped on this darkness, he and his touring bandmates—drummer Jim White, violinist Jessica Billey, and guitarist Mike Saenz—stepped into the BBC’s Maida Vale studios. The set they recorded that day with John Peel, two Smog originals and two covers, has lastly made its approach to document, billed as The Holy Grail. Regardless of its tongue-in-cheek title, for the Callahan devoted, it’s a improbable discover—a snapshot of the artist and his band at their most stripped down, highlighting his music’s sinister but beneficiant essence. The inclusion of two covers, one thing of a rarity in Callahan’s repertoire—and never simply any two covers; the Velvet Underground and Fleetwood Mac, of all bands—solely sweetens the deal.
Critics in these years, notably within the UK, tended to deal with Callahan like an incurable pessimist; the Smog songs that Callahan selected that day actually don’t appear meant to disabuse them of that notion. Each tracks prod ominously on the ambiguous sexual underbelly of his work, stirring up uncomfortable questions on how a lot we’re meant to sympathize with the songs’ grim protagonists.
“Chilly Discovery,” from Dongs of Sevotion, doesn’t sound unduly extreme at first. The place the album model weaves flanged guitar, piano accents, and whispering drums right into a downy two-chord shuffle, the Peel model is stark and unadorned, with a touch of distortion on the twinned guitars, and brushes on the drums hissing out a funereal beat. Nonetheless, there’s one thing hypnotic about its rising and falling movement; the sweetness of Callahan’s baritone papers over the hints of desolation within the lyrics. He sings of heat returns and bitter leave-takings; the primary stanza would possibly conceivably be a few beloved stray cat. However he lets unfastened with the refrain: “I may maintain a girl down on a hardwood flooring,” an incongruously sing-song lilt coloring his voice. The band surges like ocean swells, reflecting shades of Swans’ or Sonic Youth’s steely dronescapes. He repeats the road, as if rubbing our faces in it. However as in most Callahan songs, there’s a twist. The violence, if that’s what it’s, is reciprocal, as her enamel “gnash proper by me/Searching for a comfortable place.” The “chilly discovery” of the title is his basic lack: Trying to find empathy and vulnerability, his lover finds none. It’s a damning self-assessment.
