"The night will end in some form of excess," sings Smog in his gravel-grey, yet devastatingly expressive tones on 'Our Anniversary'. What's this? Bill 'Chuckles' Callahan - hitherto determined wearer of alterno rock's roughest hair shirts - revealed as a regular, rampaging hedonist?
Well, not exactly. Neither Callahan's trademark poetic gloom nor his even-keel misanthropy have been ditched in time for 'Supper', but it does see him breathing deeper than before and moving with a surprising spring in his step away from the claustrophobic intensity of his previous work. His humour - admittedly savagely sharp-toothed and mordant - has always been there for anyone who cared to listen. Opening track 'Feather By Feather', for instance, carries the verse, "When they make the movie of your life/they're going to have to ask you to do your own stunts/because nobody nobody nobody/could pull off the same shit as you/and still come out alright." To which the only possible response is - ouch.
To paint Callahan solely as a miserabilist, however, is not only to diminish the man himself but also his talent. 'Supper' sees him opening up, at least as far as the structure of his songs goes, if not the intriguing layers beneath his shadowy (Smog) creation. Sarabeth Tucek's vocal harmonising is core, but pedal-steel guitar, banjo, cello, piano and 'wind control' are also crucial to this sea change. It blows through almost every track, and you are struck - maybe for the first time - by the fact that someone who always seemed like such an artistic outsider is also necessarily part of a creative continuum. In Callahan's case, this seems to include everything from Nick Drake's urban folk to the stuttering white funk of Talking Heads, Nirvana's punk and the grizzled country of Johnny Cash.
'Morality' features guitar riffs as heavily hammered and satisfyingly dirty as anything that's come out of NYC's lower east-side lately and carries a quietly hilarious non sequitur: "I could take you/you could take me...but hey/what would my wife say/what would my wife say/if I was married." 'Ambition', too, can hold its head up in post-Sonic Youth company, but the wry, self-mocking 'Truth Serum' - where Callahan and Tucek trade lines - shows how he earned that alt.country tag.
'Supper' isn't trademark (Smog), which might cause dismay in the camps of more entrenched fans. It is, however, an intriguingly subtle twist to the career of one of American underground's most consistently engaging talents.
