Hello! Hi! We still exist!
We took the summer off to write actual songs, play actual shows, and make actual records. To start getting into the groove of things I thought it’d be pretty helpful to supply a quick overview of what the discussion of music this year has been so far between us site dudes. We’ll be framing it in the terms of our weird genre stuffs. Some of this has been covered on podcasts but enough has not that this feels necessary, and who am I to not supply necessities? Continue reading
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. 
After Sewn to the Sky, I could only wonder what madness I could expect on Forgotten Foundation. The experimentalism that was seen so early on in Bill Callahan’s career is interesting but only to an extent and by “an extent”, I really just mean Sewn to the Sky. The nature of it made sense in strange ways, but it was so grimy and harsh that it was perhaps an unintentionally original way to start a career, however, on Forgotten Foundation, it feels almost like repetition without any real inspiration. This is the worst point in Smog’s fifteen-year run. 
Sewn to the Sky is not an album that kicked off Smog into what Smog was. It was in fact, far from Smog in general, which is what makes Sewn to the Sky particularly interesting. Smog is usually labeled as somewhat of a mellow rock artist and in his debut release, he acts as a pioneer of the tape-recorded grimy lo-fi movement. This album is abrasive, bare-bones and frequently harsh to the ears, almost the opposite of Callahan’s general flow, and at the same time serves as something of a note for his future and growth. I’m going to be dead honest with you, Sewn to the Sky is not very good, but interesting on so many levels. 
Fermata over Whole Rest 