Top Albums Of 2009: #1

by Todd Kearns on January 19th, 2010

Leonard Cohen writes words so candid, so pathos-appealing, and so saturated in the human experience that he’s etched a place among the best lyricists of the last century. He’s the poet laureate of the 60s/70s songwriters and possesses one of the most hauntingly deadpan voices in Western music. Here’s why Bill Callahan’s Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle is better: he too has that exceptional way of crafting and contorting the simplest phrases into the most thoughtful bits of introspection, yet he was able to shape the words with the arrangements in a hybrid of voice and instrument.

At the risk of siphoning too much attention away from Callahan’s tour de force, Cohen and Callahan are both bards of the highest ilk; both unravel new personal depths of what it is to continue being alive while the artform they contribute to loses any sense of metaphor and meaning in the mass-production simulacra of consumer-based transparency. However, where Callahan now transcends one of his greatest influences is the ability to build a sonic landscape to support to weight of his words. Cohen produced very simple arrangements that worked to provide a pleasing skeleton for the body, flesh, and meat of his lyrics. That was their function –- the humble compositions that never challenged conventions and were truly quaint, by definition, were just noticeable enough to frame his nearly emotionless voice as it bellowed sweet lines of catharsis and self-exploration. Callahan, prior to this album we at Sun On The Sand agreed upon as the best of 2009, created catchy bits of guitar-driven lo-fi, which certainly helped stick his songs into your brain for days on end (his most well-known track recorded under the pseudonym Smog, ‘Cold Blooded Old Times’, boasts one hell of a contagious lead guitar part) but never really found an equilibrium with his oddly funny, strangely endearing wordplay.

Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle is a truly transcendent work. It’s rare to find a record that doesn’t merely settle on bringing together vocals and instrumental parts, but creates a dialogue between them. In ‘Too Many Birds’, Callahan pines “If…” then stops himself immediately, showing restraint as a swirl of Sunday-morning piano keys, a subtle snare drum, a rustic rhythm guitar riff, and fragile strings fill the space where it appears more words were meant to be uttered, but Callahan decides it’s best to devote the space to the arrangement as it asks him what he wants to say. And he responds again. “If you…” and lets the sundried piece of music circle back and speak to him again. And so he gives a little more, and a little more, until the discourse ends, and Callahan finally hears enough of the song’s responses to affirm it’s time to unveil the entirety of his plea: “If you could only/stop your heartbeat/for one heartbeat.”

Callahan’s sense of space and timing in the nine tracks that comprise this work is flawless. As the songwriter lovingly embraces the difference in nature between his unnamed comrade and himself in ‘My Friend’ (“Now I’m not saying we’re cut from the same tree”), an expertly placed cello stealthily slides in under the line, acting as a witness speaking quietly aside Callahan in an effort to corroborate this revelation. As the line continues, our poet becomes as vulnerable as we’ve ever witnessed in a near twenty-year career as he sings of the bond that ties them: “But like two pieces of the gallows/The pillar and the beam/We share a common dream/To destroy what will harm other men/My friend.” As he nears the climax of the line, in which he annunciates the title he’s bestowed on the subject of his affection in a harsh manner, gentle, feminine background vocals can be heard singing a fluttering, indecipherable chant to counteract the dichotomy of such an affectionate bond and its callous vocal stressing. It’s evident that Callahan has become a master of song pace and order, knowing exactly when to integrate new instruments into his tracks to heighten the emotion and create something that truly resonates with the listener. When the wordless ‘Invocation of Ratiocination’ flares into existence following the end of the epic ‘All Thoughts Are Prey To Some Beast’, a aural hue of electronic noise whirls while a digitized voice cries incoherent incantations in an attempt to bring the listener down from the arousal of All Thoughts just before the near-ten minute closer ”Faith/Void’ commences, allowing us to recuperate and prepare ourselves for another long, lavish song.

Ostensibly, Sometimes is a romantic album –- from documenting the growing bond between his friend to pining for his own song to become sentient and feel it’s life force flowing (if only for one heartbeat) or another meta-examination of his career in the opening track ‘Jim Cain’ (“I used to be darker/Then I got lighter/Then I got dark again”) that alludes to the overwhelming nihilism and misanthropy that drenched his songwriting as Smog, the somewhat uplifting post-Smog work, and the internal crisis found in this album that brought about the dark once more –- but in actuality, despite the gorgeous, 60s French-chanson-esque overarching sound, Callahan is suffering from an existential calamity. He begins ‘Jim Cain’ expressing a self-effacing, yet universally relatable journey he took, in which Callahan “ended up in search of ordinary things/Like how can a wave possibly be?” Yet through the course of nine songs and a somewhat perplexing allegory about his brain being a tree as his cognizance is stolen like the eggs of a bird, he arrives at the end of his reality-bending sojourn in ‘Faith/Void’; “it’s time to put God away/I put God away.” As gloomy as that may seem, Callahan is cleansed by relieving himself of such a thankless burden, one that aided in his “darkness” earlier in his career, and that plagued him throughout this album.

It’s possible that comparing Cohen and Callahan isn’t particularly fair to either artist, but whenever I begin to contemplate if stacking the two against each other is appropriate, I immediately think of Songs Of Leonard Cohen and the track ‘Stories Of The Street’, specifically the line “if by chance I wake at night and I ask you who I am/O take me to the slaughterhouse/I will wait there with the lamb”. Then I listen to ‘The Wind And The Dove’ and hear an equally succinct yet ambiguous lyric in the form of “And I am a child of linger on/I peer through the window gone”, and it encapsulates the trajectory of Callahan’s career, culminating in this record –- it would have been easy for him to make music that settled on framing his whimsy-inducing lyrics, much like Cohen did, but instead, Bill found a way to make his music speak as loud as his words.

Todd Kearns

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