TAG: Great
Released: March 1995
I’ve gone through more drafts of this review than I have of anything I’ve done, maybe even more than my professional calibers of editing. It’s not really because this album is super hard to talk about — it’s because there’s a lot to say and interpret. I’ve had many listening sessions of this record to the point of having several different and tiny memories for what the album feels like. It’s an actual diary by an emotionally disturbed and incomplete human being. It is the finality of Bill Callahan’s weirdness, its peak, his shaping into musical appropriation. Wild Love is just a bunch of things.
This “bunch of things” happens to contain one of the most memorable songs of Callahan’s varied and dedicated career. “Bathysphere”, a drum-machine backed song, which introduces the record, quickly forms into its own sprawling-yet-grounded masterpiece, and at this point in his library, no song matched up to such breadth as “Bathysphere” did. It was different, thought-out, beautiful, and simply a powerful rock song, something that he had not quite gotten to do. It is such a dark horse of a song that it makes the rest of the record a completely different and jarring experience, more in-line with what you could probably expect from 1995 Smog with more ambition and a better production set up.
There’s one song on this album that really gets to me in kind of a rotten way. “Sweet Smog Children” has a difficult-to-understand prerogative surrounding it — it’s creepy and puts Callahan in this character that is not likable at all. In fact, he has played quite unlikable characters on his albums thus far, but this is sinister. He talks about wishing to talk to “sweet smog children”, to touch them, to never be away from them. Whatever mythical purpose the song is meant to serve is blinded and replaced by these indie-rock, ironically fucked up, pedophiliac undertones. Whatever is meant, it doesn’t matter. It’s bad. Then we’re thrusted from this crippling mental blow into this count off of a cocky piano ballad track, light-hearted and comparatively carefree. It expects recovery with no remorse.
The weird themes on Wild Love have their place and sometimes conveniently dissipate into really solid experiences at just the right times. The madness descension from the hilariously cheap sounding “The Emperor” and drunken reflections of “Limited Capacity” is confirmed when the listener is brought back to musical consciousness on “It’s Rough”, the second best track on Wild Love. It controls a similarly breezy vibe to “Bathysphere” but has a different, more Smog-ready message of openly being acceptive in regards to introspection. The difference here is that it’s a well-written song outside its aesthetic and lyrical tone. At this point in the album, normalcy has been achieved, but then Callahan slowly appears giving into the madness. “Sleepy Joe” is manic and percussive. It’s pretty loud compared to the rest of the record, but loudness is matched by psychedelics in “The Candle”, which is oddly spiritual, but at the same time, there is something false and unreal about his promises and words. The song feels like a scene that never happened in the film itself — be it a flashback, dream sequence, or daydream reflection. It’s kind of genius, the way it works.
“Prince Alone In The Studio” is the album’s apex and combination of each of the song’s major properties — the rock song feel of “Bathysphere” and “It’s Rough”, the psychotics of “Be Hit”, “Sweet Smog Children”, and “The Candle”. It’s a burst that lasts seven minutes and allows the album to end on a somewhat controlled note with “Goldfish Bowl”, an anthem that just breezes by with maximum conclusion, which, by 1995 was a difficult concept for Smog. For Bill, satisfaction didn’t happen quite yet.
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