The new pollution

>> Smog's Bill Callahan on songwriting, cheerleaders and ghost stories

by MARK SLUTSKY

The songs of Smog might make you want to stick your head in the oven or they might make you laugh out loud. Most likely you'll want to engage in a bit of both. They're painful and playful at once, a hard trick to pull off without coming off as cutely self-effacing. Bill Callahan, who for the most part is the band itself, writing, singing and playing (with guest musicians varying from record to record), manages to maintain a certain, very slightly distanced tone--what he calls "objective affection"--that prevents his music from ever brushing close to strutting or self-pity. With their careful nuance, it comes as a bit of a surprise to hear him say, "The records are meant as an entertainment, and nothing beyond that. I don't think about songwriting. It's just something that comes out."

His latest record, with its Spooneristic title Dongs of Sevotion, is, like its predecessor Knock Knock, a much more polished affair than early Smog albums like Julius Caesar and Wild Love. Self-recorded and rough around the edges, early Smog was clangy and fuzzy with a real intimate charm of its own. According to Callahan, though, "the early records were ignorant. Ignorant of methods and possibilities. And also, limited by money, but mostly limited by knowledge of recording technique. Now there is money, and with each recording I learn more and more how to get what I want."

What he wants, then, is thankfully no less intimate than his earlier offerings. Though Dongs of Sevotion presents a somewhat wider variety of instrumentation, technique and even musicians (such as fellow Chicagoan and Tortoise dude John McEntire, who plays on some of the songs and recorded several of them), Callahan wisely keeps the arrangements spare and minimal.

And did I mention the cheerleaders? Well, they're on one track at least, "Bloodflow," a seven-and-a-half minute, jew's-harp-powered, almost Afro-beat-sounding number with the rhyming refrain "No time for a tête-à-tête/Can I borrow your machete." The use of the cheerleaders ("B-L-double O-D-F-L-O-W, bloodflow!"), like the children's choirs on Knock Knock, "stems only from a love of the human voice--I used these two bubbling, out of control type of vocal groups. And also, in the cheerleaders, noticing a similarity to certain African musics which fill me with hope." It's a risk, to be sure, but it works. It's singularly creepy and funny, like another standout track, "Dress Sexy At My Funeral," where Callahan urges his widow to "wink at the minister/Blow kisses to my grieving brothers."

It's too much of a simplification to attribute the sometimes cruel sentiments of his songs to the songwriter himself, a problem he's encountered before. "People will always assume the one whose mouth is moving is moving their mouth about themself. What about ghost stories around the fire? It seems to be a limitation that people put on things to make it easier on themselves."

With Frankie Sparo at Cabaret this Sunday, June 3, 9pm, $15