ANDY GILL ON ALBUMS

SMOG

Red Apple Falls

Domino WIG CD 35

To coin a metaphor, the lo-fi American "sadcore" style of such as Will (Palace) Oldham and Bill (Smog) Callahan is the driftwood detritus left, dry and withered, on the beach as the grunge tide recedes. Still world- weary, but drained of complaint, it can barely raise the energy to sulk, and so seeks more fulfilling territory within. For Callahan, every day is like doomsday: in "The Morning Paper", for instance, he achieves a kind of paradigm of pessimistic equanimity, too weary even to object: "It's all bad news, on every page," he predicts, "so roll right over and go to sleep." Oh well: in an odd sort of way, at least he's happy.

Red Apple Falls continues Smog's musical trajectory of encroaching minimalism, with the smudges of piano, French horn and lachrymose pedal steel guitar retreating ever further into the background, leaving Callahan's voice even more nakedly exposed as it relates his country-gothic confessions. The split song-cycle of "Red Apples" and "Red Apple Falls" is typical: a few funereal piano chords, a faint, almost subliminal wheeze of harmonium, and a self-lacerating lyric in which "the widow says it's hard to live/ on the lonely version of love I give".

Callahan is clearly trying for the mythic quality of songs such as "Long Black Veil", with love and fate trapped in ghastly collusion, but without slipping into the usual moral judgement or tragic irony. Instead, a kind of nonchalant fatalism wanders through these songs, speaking loudly of crushed American Dreams and curdled desires, in the face of which all hope is mere delusion, and optimism just brazen hubris. Yet for all his supposed disinterest, the real irony is that he's getting better at it all the time - if there's a more poignant expression of loneliness than Callahan's claim, in "To Be of Use", that "most of my fantasies are of making someone else come", I don't think I could bear to hear it.

CAN

Sacrilege

Mute SPOONCD 39/40

Most remix albums are simply excuses to extend the commercial life of a product and virtually none are worth bothering with. This double-CD is different: for one thing, all the source material on it is upwards of two decades old; for another, the band that recorded it has released only one new album in the past 17 years.

Can's influence continues to grow, as successive generations rediscover the roots of techno, sample-collaging and ambient music in albums such as Future Days (1973), Tago Mago (1971) and Monster Movie (their 1969 debut). The adjective "seminal" hardly seems strong enough for these German pioneers of the experimental pulse.

Which is probably why such long-standing fans as Julian Cope and John Lydon reportedly declined to contribute to Sacrilege, believing the original tracks to be perfect already - and why, of course, the album was given such an ironically self-deprecating title. Unfortunately, Messrs Lydon and Cope may well have been right, as most of the remixes here are substantially duller than the originals.

Of the better efforts, The Orb's take on "Halleluwah" and Unkle's version of "Vitamin C" are discursive and logical developments of their sources, while several others - notably A Guy Called Gerald's "Tango Whiskyman" and Francois Kevorkian's "Blue Bag" - take the drum'n'bass route, building on the cyclical drum patterns of Jaki Liebezeit, the largely unacclaimed father of modern groove styles. Only Sunroof's nine-minute version of "Oh Yeah", however, achieves a truly satisfying blend of ancient and modern, grafting the shimmering texture of the original to a subtle drum'n'bass rhythm matrix. If you're familiar with the originals, Sacrilege will frustrate more than it delights; if you're not familiar, try Future Days instead.