25th
Apocalypse
I’ve been absolutely obsessed with Bill Callahan’s Apocalypse lately. I don’t think there will be a better album released this year. Part of what I love about it is it feels alive, like it’s happening as you’re listening to it. The way Callahan sings and some of the lyrics indicate that he is figuring this album out as he goes. In the song “America,” he’s watching David Letterman in Australia, homesick for America, while making up a song about doing just that. In “Riding for the Feeling,” he’s in a hotel room with the TV on mute, listening back to tapes and thinking about what the album is missing. A couple times throughout the course of Apocalypse, he sings about “my apocalypse” like he’s talking about the record he’s making. In the Rumpus interview he did earlier this year, there was this great exchange about his apocalypse:
Rumpus: In “One Fine Morning” you sing that “it’s all coming back to me now/My apocalypse.” Elaborate, what exactly is your apocalypse and what brought you to explore it with this record?
Callahan: In “Riding for the Feeling,” riding for the feeling is the apocalypse. Or in broader terms, the genesis of an idea is the apocalypse. In “One Fine Morning” the apocalypse is the record Apocalypse and also Man vs. Nature and vice versa!
My favorite part of the record is at the very end of the last song “One Fine Morning” when he sings “DC 450” which is the number of the pressing of this album from his label Drag City. It’s such a strange way to end an album, but it makes perfect sense with Apocalypse. I’ve never heard a record that feels alive like this, but the only one I can think of that comes close is Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks. When music is alive like this, you feel this strange sense of possibility that is so rare to find on a record.
