Special guest reviewer Peter Beatty follows up his Why I Love on Bill Callahan by reviewing his latest album…

Release Date: Available now

Label: Bandcamp / Drag City Records

Format: digital

There’s always something of going on a voyage with every Bill Callahan album, and his latest release Resuscitate! invites you on an unrestrained and energetic, dreamlike exploration. This is a live album with no new songs, but don’t let that disappoint you, for the intrepid journey Callahan invites you on is one that reinvents his songs with a wonderful freedom – one that will be heartily enjoyed by his fans.

When Bill Callahan released his 2022 album YTI⅃AƎЯ’ he said : “It felt like it was necessary to rouse people – rouse their love, their kindness, their anger, rouse anything in them. Get their senses working again”.

The album came when we were resurfacing from the Covid pandemic. Callahan described the time as if we were emerging from a dream, that we were halfway between sleep and wakefulness, and that he wanted to offer something that felt like it cleared the air and lifted you up – to help in this moment that we were all venturing out again.

While touring ‘TI⅃AƎЯ, Bill Callahan decided to document the live versions of the songs, explaining “songs tend to mutate after they’ve been recorded” and that he “knew these songs were about to get superpowers”.

And so, it’s a performance recorded at Chicago’s Thalia Hall in March 2022, during the YTI⅃AƎЯ’ tour, that forms his latest album Resuscitate!

not all doom and gloom

For someone who can be, in ‘Cave-ian’ fashion, a purveyor of doom and gloom, it was nice to see Callahan read the room. The release of YTI⅃AƎЯ’ offered us an energising, surprising experience, full of joy and playfulness, seeing beauty in small things. In all its delivery, Resuscitate! is even more rousing and sensory.

Right from the get-go, opener First Bird immediately entices you into a mysterious twilight, as he sings “and we’re coming out of dreams, as we’re coming back to dreams”. There’s a sense of awakening, and an imminent dawn, that continues to build in second track Coyotes, which in this live version is allowed a long and wild introduction, as if representing the chaotic dream-state we were all in during the pandemic, before we began to remerge.

This makes the lyric “they say never wake a dreamer, maybe that’s how we die” even more pertinent – that the way you wake someone from a dream state can have a real impact upon the way they feel once they are awake. With the live performance on Resuscitate! one feels Bill Callahan is wide awake and knows exactly what state he wants you to be in.  

Featuring seven songs from YTI⅃AƎЯ’, Callahan plays further on the resuscitation theme, including live versions of a couple of tracks from his back catalogue, as well as one from his Smog days.

While songs like Naked Souls bring back the feeling of wanting to hide away, or while Everyway refers to a shared struggle with its line “at least we’re all in this horse together,” there’s a sense that Bill Callahan and his musicians are feeling enlivened, and that Callahan is not just waking up the songs from YTI⅃AƎЯ, but perhaps he’s also waking up to a new version of himself.

During the song Partition he refers to the struggle of the time, singing “Meditate, ventilate, do what you’ve got to do,” or “microdose, change your clothes.” But whereas on YTI⅃AƎЯ, Partition feels musically more anxious, tense and on the edge of something, on Resuscitate! it feels you’ve stepped inside something, and the apprehension has lifted. A psychedelic desert rock-out that is no longer simply the suggestion of a microdose, but instead as if you’re dancing at the centre of one.

songs with superpowers

And overall, all the songs are given “superpowers”, sometimes in the form of Callahan being freer with his melodies, but most often, it’s by giving the other musicians the space to play. Matt Kinsey on guitar, Dustin Laurenzi on alto sax and Jim White on the kit, all fill this space freely, beautifully and wildly, and with a stirring, transportive delivery, as do a host of other musicians, who join at times to add other instruments.

Ultimately, Resuscitate! becomes something that’s heavier, bolder and wakes the senses even more than YTI⅃AƎЯ. There’s an unhinged wildness at times reminiscent of Neil Young – a songwriter and band of musicians voyaging on the same plane as one another, and truly wanting you to join them on it.

I can see Resuscitate! appealing to fans of both Smog and fans of the Bill Callahan we’ve known of the past 15 years. This is not just because he includes a little back catalogue, but also because in Callahan’s previous incarnation under the name Smog, there was often a rawness to the material and the delivery.

Great live albums offer a sense of the energy between the act and the audience, and there is a real sense of that on Resuscitate! With the release of Resuscitate!, documenting the ‘superpowers’ of a band clearly enjoying playing together so much, I’m hoping this latest album is a heavy hint that those with tickets to one of his four nights at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London at the end of September are in for a treat.

Here’s keep Some Steady Friends Around:

Peter’s own Different Flowers album reviewed here…

Bill Callahan online: Bandcamp