SMOG - A River Ain’t Too Much Love

You know the type who thinks "if a record doesn't innovate, it's pointless"?

The ones who get uneasy if they don't hear a revolutionary bassline or a seminal riff?

Well, it's unlikely that such listeners will find much to salvage in the twelfth album by Bill Callahan aka Smog.

"A River Ain't Too Much Love", in fact, doesn't stray far from the previous chapters in the saga of this lo-fi troubadour, chronicler of loneliness and disillusionment.

For those who instead see the search for emotion as the whole reason for listening to music, it's not unreasonable to imagine that some shiver might still rise from the grooves of this dusty songbook, which seems to have emerged from the attic of an old Texan farmhouse.

Ten sepia-toned snapshots, yellowed in the memories of a mythical America, close kin to the one narrated by the "Southern" pens of William Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. An ancient, rural America, made of rivers and prairies, wells and rocks, railroads and songs by the fire.

Chronically afflicted by world-weariness, Callahan has always preferred to hide behind surreal masks of the "loser": betrayed lovers, oddball cowboys, old drunks, sons submerged in diving bells, or even... Prince left alone in his studio!

This time, however, he seems to have chosen to settle scores with himself, sinking into a more personal, intimate dimension, in an entirely interior road movie. "A journey into the pornography of my past", as he singularly put it.

Perhaps this is also why he decided to strip away every orchestral flourish, accompanied only by his own guitar, Connie Lovatt's bass and the drumming of the great Jim White (Dirty Three), with sporadic touches of hammer dulcimer, violin and piano.

When the alchemy works, it sends shivers down your spine.

The opener alone is proof enough: the bone-chilling folk-blues of "Palimpsest", where Callahan's unsettling baritone wraps itself around the bare skeleton of an acoustic guitar, intoning despondent lines that verge on self-parody: "Why's everybody looking at me/ Like there's something fundamentally wrong? …Like a Southern bird, who's stayed North too long".

The mind wanders to the folk classicism of Lambchop, but also to the ghostly landscapes of "Songs Of Leonard Cohen".

White's brushes, barely grazing cymbals and snare, trace the horizon of these bucolic hallucinations.

When the drumming instead picks up steam, unexpected rock surges burst forth (the coda of the ballad "Say Valley Maker", the more agitated passages of "The Well", the tense, nerve-wracked rhythmic spirals of "Let Me See The Colts").

The record's emotional climax, though, lies in the waltz of "Rock Bottom Riser", a Cohen-esque redemption song (or one worthy of late-period Cave), in which Callahan's spare fingerpicking caresses an open-hearted confession ("I love my mother/ I love my father/ I love my sisters too/ I bought my guitar/ To plead my love/ To pledge my love to you"), warming up in the drumming's knowing cadences and swelling with melody thanks to the magnificent piano lines of Joanna Newsom, a songwriter of real pedigree and Smog's labelmate.

Elsewhere, the shadows of Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson loom large (it's no coincidence the album was recorded at the Pedernales Studios in Spicewood, Texas, owned by the latter).

Hence the country-blues knees-up of "The Well", with violin counterpointing the guitar's caressing chords and one of the angriest refrains in the whole Smog catalogue ("fuck all y'all"), or the slow-motion western of "I'm New Here", almost statuesque in its austerity, or again the campfire song "In The Pines" (a traditional commonly attributed to Leadbelly), sung by Callahan with a fairy-tale inflection amid violin embroidery and the rustle of percussion.

These are refined but mannered exercises, verging on academic, betraying an inconsistent inspiration at the songwriting stage.

Class alone, in short, cannot dispel the sense of a songwriting growing ever more self-referential and now dangerously close to a dead end.

The main points of interest, besides the tracks mentioned at the start, come from the lyrics, always curious, sharp, dense with metaphors and philosophical musings: the bottom of the well as the abyss of the soul, the river that swells and dries following the opposing seasons of love but can also be read as a metaphor for death ("when the river dries/ will you bury me in wood"), lush nature as a mirror of the fertility of feelings…

More broadly, what emerges is the almost "mystical" naturalism of a Smog sworn enemy of modernity and its times.

Having already delivered some of the best singer-songwriter albums of the last fifteen years, Mr. Callahan may be starting to show a few signs of fading, but he certainly hasn't made peace with himself.

And this, after all, is what still gives us reason for hope.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

30/04/2026