4 Smog Red Apple Falls

You Say: “Alt country in Callahan’s image… Beware, that red apple augurs no good.” Cath Berry, via e-mail

With its mournful horns, lilting pedal steel, scraping fiddle and quietly tick-tocking acoustic guitars, and enveloping Jim O’Rourke production, Red Apple Falls could simply be regarded as Smog-goes-country. However, from its opening track The Morning Paper, where the narrator falls back into sleep rather than face the horrors of the modern world (“It’s all bad news on every page”), it’s a country album that rarely goes outdoors, instead tracking the life of a room-bound loner, a new face in a new town, haunted by images of red apples, blood-red birds, and the ill deeds of his terrible past: “The widow says I broke her first/Of course I say just the reverse.”