Album: SMOG

Rain on Lens, Drag City/Domino

The follow-up to last year's superb Dongs of Sevotion finds Bill (Smog) Callahan musing upon compromise and commitment, tacking between the two with typically low-key panache. It's an album of denial and contradiction, from the characters in "Song" – soldier, gravedigger, pack mule, freelance fence-painter etc – deliberately denying their own raisons d'être, to the embittered partner in "Short Drive" who "took your party invitation list/ And wrote 'enemies' across the top of it." At its heart is a debate about individuality and collectivism, bounded on one side by "Keep Some Steady Friends Around", in which Callahan considers the need to be alone and self-determining while retaining some sort of fellowship with humanity, and on the other by "Live as if Someone Is Always Watching You", in which he reflects on the necessity of private space in a relationship, as if the other's gaze shackled one's imagination: "Shut your eye off once in a while/ So at least one of us/ Can with some conviction say:/ I am not of this glutty room/ Or of this flubby body." There's a sinister intimacy to Callahan's oddly characterless murmured vocals that matches his penchant for jarring images ("It's snaining outside"; "God does not answer this type of prayer"), while the hypnotic riffs, sparsely embellished with guitar, violin and woodwind, evoke a much more authentic, disturbing suggestion of mental instability than anything on Macy Gray's album.