As the 20th century stumbled into the new millennium, dark energy rippled through the universe Bill Callahan had dreamed it to be. The music he had spent the previous decade creating as Smog had maintained a tenuous balance of bleak beauty and wry humor. Then, for a minute there, with the apocalyptic 1999 Knock Knock—a breakup record and a self-discovery record featuring some of the most unbearable songs of his career—it seemed like maybe he'd turned a corner, tamed some demons. “For the first time in my life/Getting away getting away getting away/From me,” he sang on “Held,” as if the speaker's soul was a Mylar balloon escaping the white fist of an embittered, stagnant man-child.
But gravity is a hell of a pull, and with the 2000s Dongs of Sevotion and of 2001 Rain on the lensCallahan was back in the muck with his usual cast of characters: frustrating siblings, obsessive nihilists, ambivalent closets and, above all, unreliable men with broken moral compasses. In December 2001, shrouded in this darkness, he and his bandmates on tour—drummer Jim White, violinist Jessica Billey and guitarist Mike Saenz—entered the BBC's Maida Vale studios. The set they recorded that day with John Peel, two Smog originals and two covers, finally got around to recording, called The Holy Grail. Despite its unusual title, for Callahan devotees it's a fantastic find – a snapshot of the artist and his band at their most stripped-down, revealing the grim yet generous essence of his music. The inclusion of two covers, something of a rarity in Callahan's repertoire — and not just two covers. the Velvet Underground and Fleetwood Mac, of all bands — just sweeten the deal.
Critics in those years, particularly in the UK, tended to treat Callahan as an incurable pessimist. The Smog songs Callahan chose that day certainly don't seem intended to dissuade them from that idea. Both tracks ominously advance the ambiguous sexual underpinnings of his work, raising uncomfortable questions about how much we should empathize with the songs' bleak protagonists.
“Cold Discovery”, by Dongs of Sevotionit doesn't sound unduly serious at first. Where the album version weaves flanging guitar, piano touches and whispering drums into a two-string drum, the Peel version is stark and unadorned, with a hint of distortion in the twin guitars and drum brushes whistling a deathly beat. . Yet there is something hypnotic about its rise and fall. the sweetness of Callahan's baritone papers over the hints of desolation in the lyrics. He sings warm comebacks and bitter leave-offs. the first stanza might conceivably be about a beloved stray cat. But he lets it loose with the chorus: “I could hold a woman down on a hardwood floor,” a no-nonsense sing-song that colors his voice. The band billows like ocean swells, echoing the nuances of Swans or Sonic Youth's steely, droned landscapes. He repeats the line, as if rubbing our faces in it. But as with most Callahan songs, there's a twist. The violence, if that's what it is, is two-way, as her teeth “grind right into me/Looking for a soft spot.” The “cold discovery” of the title is its fundamental lack: Looking for empathy and vulnerability, his lover finds none. It is a damning self-assessment.
