10 Smog The Doctor Came At Dawn
You Say: “Ten songs of how the heart can break. The sleeve art is haunting enough.” Derek Coleman, via e-mail.
Arguably Callahan’s bleakest work, 10 intense, intimate dissections of relationships, failed or failing, set against ghostly guitar atmospherics, horror movie strings, ironic handclaps and empty-room piano. A perfect late-night record, it also features one of Callahan’s greatest songs, All Your Women Things, in which, against mournful cello, his narrator occupies an eerie middleground between sociopath and broken-hearted lover, listing all his ex-partner’s belongings – “All your buckles and straps/Releases and traps” – seven years after her departure (or is it her disappearance?), with a sincerity and a sorrow that edges into the macabre.