Bill Callahan - Queen Elizabeth Hall, London

“I like these lights…but this isn’t what we really look like,” jokes Bill Callahan, in his sole piece of between-song banter tonight (he later repeats the comment at an opportune moment, but that still counts as one in my book). Callahan may have dropped the alias, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to get a clearer look at the man they once called ‘Smog.’ In fact, tonight’s show is a conspicuously less stripped down affair than one might expect.
Callahan leads a well-drilled five-piece band through most of the new album, Woke on a Whaleheart, a couple from 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much To Love, and one or two oldies, including ‘Bathysphere,’ which is lent subtlety by the violin and piano but still kicks plenty of ass. Though he later also knocks out ‘Cold Blooded Old Times,’ Mr. Bill Smog is certainly not taking requests. Shouts of ‘Hit the Ground Running’ and ‘I Break Horses’ are met with an exaggerated nod, the kind of slightly eerie gesture you might see from one of David Lynch’s characters, or a patient parent pacifying a child; yet somehow it comes across endearing rather than condescending.
So Bill does every track off his new album, except the one called ‘The Wheel.’ I’m somewhat relieved by this: there’s nothing wrong with the song, just that it’s pretty much a straight-ahead swingin’ country tune, which makes me a touch nervous. I like straight country, but for some reason I get uncomfortable when ‘alt. country’ artists (if we must use that silly term) altogether drop the ‘alt.’ If you’re listening to Hank Williams I’m fine, do it with pride; but if someone walks over and the stereo’s playing Smog, or Will Oldham maybe, and that particular track just happens to be a full-on Nashville thigh-slapper, I find myself explaining that this one is just an anomaly really, the others are really dark and brutal and on a par with Melville and Emersonian transcendentalism and stuff like that.

So no ‘Wheel’ then, but other tracks from Whaleheart really come off tonight. ‘Footprints’ strides along, animated by its gorgeous violin part, while piano player Jonathan Meiburg nails a great backing vocal. ‘Diamond Dancer,’ probably the closest Callahan will ever get to a Bond soundtrack, achieves a similar frisson, and ‘Sycamore’ is as triumphantly beautiful as you’d expect. However, aside from these highlights, the new material, while good, has the side-effect of reminding one just how great the last album was. Any new work from Callahan is always welcome, but it’s hard to top songs like ‘Say Valley Maker’ and ‘Rock Bottom Riser.’
That said, both of these tracks get an outing tonight and don’t reach the heights one would expect, the latter sounding like Bill could do with a break from singing it for a while. Arguably, by keeping his arrangements basically the same (thus diverging from someone like Will Oldham, who in his live performances won’t sing a single note the same as the album, even on brand new material) Callahan limits himself to either reproducing album versions of his songs, or making changes in vocal phrasing so minor as to have no notable effect. Then again, with that voice, which could split the sky in two, part the seas, and charm the birds down from the trees all at once, he can do pretty much what the hell he likes.

Which, of course, is exactly what he does: a seething desire for personal freedom imbues all of Bill Callahan’s work. And because of this we look to him for clues on how we, too, might become so free. It may be that Bill’s solo gigs, just him and the guitar, have a better chance of conveying such revelations than the highly competent, certainly affecting, but ultimately limited set-up of tonight’s show. Callahan has undeniable presence—he is sharp as a fox and straight as a tree. But the way his songwriting has developed, in that great American tradition of the transcendent wanderer weaved into nature’s tapestry, we almost expect to see an actual tree, with Bill lying beneath it, leaning and loafing and at his ease observing a spear of summer grass. Hell, we want him to be a tree; a river, a field, a wolf, a bird; the sun and the moon. And that’s quite a lot to ask of one evening’s entertainment. It’s all there, this wild and shimmering beauty, in his recorded work, and always present to some degree in his voice, and we should be thankful for the less intense but still very pretty performance we get to hear tonight. After all, it’s not everyday the sun and moon nip down to the riverbank and knock out a few tunes.