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Amazon.co.uk Review
To his closest fans, it probably came as nothing less than outright heresy, but Red Apple Falls--the seventh album from the motherlode-of-miserycore Smog--ended sombre-faced indie pioneer Bill Callahan's nine-year flirtation with the ethics of lo-fi forever. That it was Smog's strongest work to date was in no small part down to the influence of producer Jim O'Rourke; coupling pianos, horns, pedal steel, and all manner of light alt-country flourishes to Callahan's desperate tales of withered love, all-consuming misanthropy, and doom-laden death imagery, O'Rourke skilfully twitches aside the curtains to let shafts of light into a monumentally twisted psyche. And while the record's first words--"The morning paper is on its way / It's all bad news on every page"--might be thoroughly bleak, this is undoubtedly a work of painful humanity; like the voice of, say, Leonard Cohen, Callahan's remarkably emotive, expressive semi-spoken vocal is capable of expressing anything from lump-in-throat empathy to startlingly inhuman callousness. Red Apple Falls would, in turn, be superceded by Smog's next record--2000's glorious Knock Knock--but this is Callahan's cold new dawn, and it sounds satisfyingly, peerlessly mordant. -- Louis Pattison
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
Smog's `Red Apple Falls' is arguably alt-country in the truest sense of the definition; traditional country instruments such as pedal steel guitar, Hammond and piano are employed with Bill Callahan's unconventional musical vision to create something new and wonderful.
The album throughout is spare, unsettling and haunting. The mournful horn refrain and pessimistic lyric of `The Morning Paper' sets the tone for the record. `Red Apples' is so skeletal with its piano accompaniment; the lyrics to this song and several others evoke weirdly nightmarish imagery with repeating motifs.
The two real upbeat songs, `I Was a Stranger' and `Ex Con', both tell tales from the outsider's perspective. The former impresses particularly with its narrator's self-justifying excuses for socially unacceptable behaviour: "Why do you women in this town/Let me look at you so bold/When you should have seen what I was" ending with the killer couplet: "I was worse than a stranger/I was well known".
`Red Apple Falls' is undeniably depressing in places but it delivers an enormous emotional impact and is suffused with beauty and brilliance. It will get under your skin and stay with you like Lou Reed's `Berlin' or Slint's `Spiderland'. The only disappointing track is the closer `Finer Days', which is a bit aimless after the superb preceding ragged call-to-arms of `Inspirational', but I can only give it five stars. Wonderful stuff.
The album throughout is spare, unsettling and haunting. The mournful horn refrain and pessimistic lyric of `The Morning Paper' sets the tone for the record. `Red Apples' is so skeletal with its piano accompaniment; the lyrics to this song and several others evoke weirdly nightmarish imagery with repeating motifs.
The two real upbeat songs, `I Was a Stranger' and `Ex Con', both tell tales from the outsider's perspective. The former impresses particularly with its narrator's self-justifying excuses for socially unacceptable behaviour: "Why do you women in this town/Let me look at you so bold/When you should have seen what I was" ending with the killer couplet: "I was worse than a stranger/I was well known".
`Red Apple Falls' is undeniably depressing in places but it delivers an enormous emotional impact and is suffused with beauty and brilliance. It will get under your skin and stay with you like Lou Reed's `Berlin' or Slint's `Spiderland'. The only disappointing track is the closer `Finer Days', which is a bit aimless after the superb preceding ragged call-to-arms of `Inspirational', but I can only give it five stars. Wonderful stuff.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
Smog's `Red Apple Falls' is arguably alt-country in the truest sense of the definition; traditional country instruments such as pedal steel guitar, Hammond and piano are employed with Bill Callahan's unconventional musical vision to create something new and wonderful.
The album throughout is spare, unsettling and haunting. The mournful horn refrain and pessimistic lyric of `The Morning Paper' sets the tone for the record. `Red Apples' is so skeletal with its piano accompaniment; the lyrics to this song and several others evoke weirdly nightmarish imagery with repeating motifs.
The two real upbeat songs, `I Was a Stranger' and `Ex Con', both tell tales from the outsider's perspective. The former impresses particularly with its narrator's self-justifying excuses for socially unacceptable behaviour: "Why do you women in this town/Let me look at you so bold/When you should have seen what I was" ending with the killer couplet: "I was worse than a stranger/I was well known".
`Red Apple Falls' is undeniably depressing in places but it delivers an enormous emotional impact and is suffused with beauty and brilliance. It will get under your skin and stay with you like Lou Reed's `Berlin' or Slint's `Spiderland'. The only disappointing track is the closer `Finer Days', which is a bit aimless after the superb preceding ragged call-to-arms of `Inspirational', but I can only give it five stars. Wonderful stuff.
The album throughout is spare, unsettling and haunting. The mournful horn refrain and pessimistic lyric of `The Morning Paper' sets the tone for the record. `Red Apples' is so skeletal with its piano accompaniment; the lyrics to this song and several others evoke weirdly nightmarish imagery with repeating motifs.
The two real upbeat songs, `I Was a Stranger' and `Ex Con', both tell tales from the outsider's perspective. The former impresses particularly with its narrator's self-justifying excuses for socially unacceptable behaviour: "Why do you women in this town/Let me look at you so bold/When you should have seen what I was" ending with the killer couplet: "I was worse than a stranger/I was well known".
`Red Apple Falls' is undeniably depressing in places but it delivers an enormous emotional impact and is suffused with beauty and brilliance. It will get under your skin and stay with you like Lou Reed's `Berlin' or Slint's `Spiderland'. The only disappointing track is the closer `Finer Days', which is a bit aimless after the superb preceding ragged call-to-arms of `Inspirational', but I can only give it five stars. Wonderful stuff.
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