Bill Callahan: Have Fun With God – review

(Drag City)

Whatever the word dub means to you, chances are Bill Callahan's version won't match it. Have Fun With God is dub in the root sense of a double: essentially, it's a cubist remix of his 2013 album Dream River, fracturing the surface of each song the more strikingly to communicate the emotion at its core. Thank Dub inhabits an eerie parallel universe to Dream River's opening track The Sing, itself a song about a man trapped within a lonely parallel universe of hotel bars and sleeping strangers. Lyrics are elided, the guitar slides around icily, while the ghost of a mandolin blows in on a breeze. Where Javelin Unlanding is playful, sweet even, its remix, Expanding Dub, is more choppy and enervated, with hints of Ry Cooder in its spaciousness. In the shift from Summer Painter to Summer Dub, Callahan whips up a guitar-and-cymbal storm so crashingly fraught, you believe the song's narrator actually is a sorcerer with weather at his command. As a standalone album, Have Fun With God doesn't totally compel – but as a companion to its source material, it's fascinating.

Contributor

Maddy Costa

The GuardianTramp

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