(Drag City)

For more than 15 years, Bill Callahan made his name under the guise of Smog. While it was never easy to pin down what Smog did musically, as he often swerved through various genres, the themes were often similiar. A monotone voice singing of deep despair, isolation and sexual perversion with a twisted sense of dark humor, Callahan could easily make a listener uncomfortable and awkward, which was probably the intent anyway.

After a mid- to late-1990s peak with albums such as Wild Love, The Doctor Came at Dawn, Red Apple Falls and Knock Knock, Smog seemed to be in decline creatively. While never bad, it seemed as though the sting of his muse had subsided and the songs seemed to fall somewhere close to self-parody. Fortunately, 2005’s A River Ain’t Too Much to Love was a welcome return to stronger songwriting, and with his new record, Woke on a Whaleheart, Callahan not only drops the Smog veil for the first time but also sheds quite a bit of light into his lyrics and almost seems to be admitting that things aren’t so dark anymore.

The album’s opener, “From the Rivers to the Oceans,” is a slow meditation on love, mystery and danger, while “Diamond Dancer” is a simple narrative about being in awe of someone without the creepy voyeurism that would have most likely been in the foreground if this song were written by Callahan 10 years ago. On “The Wheel” and the album’s closer, “A Man Needs a Woman or a Man to Be a Man,” he comes very close to conventional country music, a style he has flirted with since Knock Knock but never fully embraced as much as now. “The Wheel” could be perceived as a drifter’s gospel hymn, while on “A Man Needs a Woman” Callahan delves into the mystery of womanhood, all the while questioning himself.

In shedding the moniker of Smog, Callahan seems to have unveiled a bit more of himself, exposing more than anyone familiar with his music would have expected. Although the record is filled with self-doubt, in Callahan’s world this could be almost as close as we ever get to his “I’m in love” record. It is sometimes intense, often baffling and ultimately beautiful.