Bill Callahan - Ytilaer - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Bill Callahan releases his latest album, DREAM RIVER.

You heard it here first - it's the Gold Record we always knew Bill Callahan had in him! Last summer, he returned from a silence of years - now, he's raring to go with another new one already. The abiding humanity of latter-day Callahan is highlighted by dark plumes of caustic wit upending standards of our everyday life and the songs that celebrate it the job, the wife, the TV, the neighbors. Bill slips easily into his characters, whether they're easy people or not - and the cross-hatch of their light and shadow is unpredictably entertaining in the manner that belongs only one singer in this whole wide world we're still talking about Bill Callahan.

As you listen to Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest, a feeling of totality, of completeness, steals over you, like a thief in broad daylight. Of course it does - you're listening to a new Bill Callahan record! The first one in almost six years! What more do you need to complete you? Or perhaps, after all the time, the obvious needs to be made just a little more explicit? The sense of a life thunderstruck by change infuses Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest - the songs wander from expressions of newfound joy and great contentment to other snapshots, considerations of the not-joy that we all know. Unsettling dream-images and mythic recollections are patiently received; the undertow of the past is resisted, pulling against it instead into the present, accepting revolutions of time and the unconscious as a natural flow.