On his closing nice report, 2019’s “Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest,” the 56-year-old songwriter gave the impression to be shooing off the decades-thick mystique putting over his lifestyles’s paintings — a list relationship again to the cryptic, lo-fi ballads he made within the early ’90s as Smog — and pivoting into relatively lucid folks turf, making a song songs about parenthood and domesticity whilst nonetheless managing to floor the existential weirdness of the on a regular basis.
He retrieves that thread originally of his atypical new album, “Ytilaer,” making a song a couple of wide awake second whilst reestablishing the bottom flooring of his voice: “And we’re popping out of goals as we’re coming again to goals.” Within the words that observe, his babies come shuffling towards his bed room, and along with obsolescing the alarm clock, they’re additionally right here to ship somewhat lesson about how fact and creativeness conjoin. Out of 1 trance, into some other. Whether or not it is going down in our mindful or subconscious minds, all of it counts as lifestyles.
That makes “Lily” — a half-annihilated music a couple of mom’s demise — this album’s maximum staggering. Patiently pushing the distance between his phrases canyon-wide, Callahan describes the incomprehensibility of demise because it violates the silence of a health facility hall. “The gurney wheels screamed all down the corridor,” he sings, “similar to a seagull screaming down the corridor.” Perceptive then confounded, he’s not able to enlarge the metaphor. This gurney appears like seagulls, which sound like seagulls, which seems like grief in all of its allergy and bewilderment.
The birds go back in “Drainface,” some other spartan lullaby the place Callahan takes a complete 20 seconds to ship a unusually demolishing insult: “Each and every time you open your mouth, useless or death seagulls fall out.” How indignant is he with this particular person? Is he indignant with this particular person? Callahan’s stoicism is what distinguishes him some of the present scrum of largest dwelling singer-songwriters, and his dedication to the proposition feels as radical as ever. We think the human making a song voice to meet this expressive, emotive function, however he refuses.
As ever, his inscrutability seems like an upside-down kindness, the paradox of his lyrics growing room for minds to wander and beauty. Like when Callahan sings, “I think one thing approaching, a illness or a music,” is he implying that each are catchy? When he sings about an infestation of boll weevils, however names the music “Bowevil” (bow-evil), is he commenting at the cultish politics of a country recently devouring itself? When he claims to have “heard the planets making a song, making a song as they spun, vaguely Hawaiian,” is he making connection with the Laniakea Supercluster, the galaxy supercluster during which we are living, named after the Hawaiian phrase for “immense heaven?”
The solutions aren’t within the songs. They’re in our heads, or in our goals, or in all of the different puts the place song refuses to be measured by way of yardsticks or clocks — a heaven too immense to even identify.