Bill Callahan
YTI⅃AƎЯ

4.2
excellent

Review

by Sunnyvale STAFF
October 20th, 2022 | 43 replies

Release Date: 2022 | Tracklist

Review Summary: Deep thoughts and good music

I feel something coming on, a disease or a song

Bill Callahan’s latest is entitled YTI⅃AƎЯ (it’s “Reality” flipped over, get it?). Like his usual work, the album falls into “love it or hate it” territory, with Callahan half-singing and half-talking his way through philosophical lyrics. Here, there are three predominant concerns: animals, dreams, and death, with discussion of said topics producing moods ranging from faintly humorous to gut-wrenchingly sad. Callahan’s lyrics flow from the grotesque (“we warmed our hands in the corpse of a dead horse”) to effortlessly affecting (“I started writing your death song long before you were gone”). It’s important to note too that the musical accompaniment is unusually engaging as well, from the gentle folk of “First Bird” to energetic numbers like “Partition” and “Natural Information” to the spacey experimentalism of “Planets”.

I wanted to put on your favorite song, a gift sealed thirty years on

Callahan provides the listener with a bunch of stunners on this album, but it’s doubtful that anything tops “Lily”. Its depiction of a dying loved one is potent, at once deeply touching and unflinching. Perhaps the highest praise which can be given is that it reminds me of (very different act) Gang Of Youths’ “You In Everything”, both in subject matter and in its combination of the thoughtful and the straightforward.

In her dream she is coyote, which of course is what she used to be

“Coyotes” is another top-notch tune, at once a purely pretty song and one with enough lyrical complexity that I come away with a different interpretation with every listen. The cited lyric, in reference to an aging and asleep dog, is characteristic. It never fails to hit me in the heart, but whether Callahan is referencing the idea of reincarnation, loss of youth, or that dreams are a form of reality (or all of the above) isn’t clear, and all the better.

Last one at the party, you always said he had to go

Appropriately, this review will end with a discussion of the album closer. “Last One At The Party” isn’t as expansive as many of its tracklist counterparts, but it taps a font of peculiar melancholy to produce a fitting ending. The quoted line above evokes a sense of pathos when delivered in Callahan’s somber baritone which exceeds whatever you’d get from a simple word-by-word reading. In the final analysis, that’s what is exceptional about YTI⅃AƎЯ, despite the record running slightly long and a few songs getting a bit repetitive: the lyrics and the arrangements are great, sure, but it’s the singer-songwriter’s ability to make us feel “it” which matters. In the (very funny) comedy show Review, main character Forrest MacNeil intones the tagline “life: it’s literally all we have” during each episode’s intro. Well, in this case, the music is about reality, or at least some twisted-around version of it. These are songs which manage to pull a sort of magic and meaning from various angles of the mundane. After all, reality is all we’ve got.

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