Sound Check

Drag City label bands drum up valium-rock

Edith Frost
Calling Over Time
(Drag City)

Smog
Red Apple Falls
(Drag City)

By Morgan Keep
Music Editor

Does drum n' bass irritate your pleasantly tranquil existence? Are you the kind of person who is never in the mood to dance? Then sit right back and lend an ear to the smooth washes of valium-rock being gently lulled into existence by the artists of Chicago's unique Drag City label.
Edith Frost's Calling Over Time is a typical Drag City affair, with Gastr Del Sol's David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke playing on the album, and O'Rourke producing. Frost's slow and lovely collection of 11 songs merges `70s singer/songwriter ballads with gentle country-pop.
On one hand, Calling Over Time is sleepy music--it can make the listener rather tired. But perhaps more accurately, this is music by people who are tired--tired of life you might say. The slack tempo of the acoustic guitars and sparse piano chords hold-up the exasperated sigh of Frost's voice, giving the impression of a person who is just giving up.
The lyrics, however, tell a conflicting story. On the gorgeously melancholy opener, "Temporary Loan," Frost confesses: I sing the blues most every night / and wait for the one I lost. And even though she resolves to look for a love that lasts / a love that never dies. Frost doesn't seem confident that she'll ever find such a love.
Likewise, "Follow" and "Calling Over Time" show glimpses of hope and the slightest flicker of love despite the music's weary mood. Frost is very much a songwriter in the vein of Leonard Cohen. But somehow the dark despair of Cohen or even the intense inner turmoil of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks contain a redemptive quality that allows a sort of catharsis. Frost's Calling Over Time is unable to achieve this and ultimately just drags the listener down.
Later in the album, songs like "Too Happy" and "Give Up Your Love" offer a slightly more upbeat attitude but these country-flavored ballads are too pleasantly easy-listening to be very engaging. B

Even less engaging is Smog's latest effort, Red Apple Falls which brings the energy level up one notch from Frost's album thanks to drum-backed songs peppered throughout the sea of acoustic melancholy. O'Rourke's instrumental and production skills are again present, but the results are sadly unmemorable.
The whole Drag City camp seems determined to take the ideas of labelmate Mayo Thompson's early work and carry them forward indefinitely and toward no apparent goal. At best we get Gastr Del Sol doing their inspired version of Thompson's work on God Bless the Red Krayola and All Who Sail With It. But albums like Smog's Red Apple Falls show a group of people who take Thompson's 1970 solo album Corky's Debt to His Fatheras an excuse for people with less-than-golden throats to become singer/songwriter types.
So hovering somewhere in-between Thompson and the depressing side of Lou Reed, Smog's Bill Callahan sings songs that sound meaningful until they are inspected more closely. Lines like I went down to the river / To meet the widow / She gave me an apple / It was red are stretched out and paced in a manner that attempts to lend them a sense of poeticism. It doesn't work.
Red Apple Falls lacks both the sense of humor and the delight in experimentation that allow Thompson's work to succeed. Not until the joltingly peppy "Ex-con" are we treated to any of the stimulating creativity that has made Drag City artists stand out in the past. And though the lyrics Whenever I get dressed up / I feel like an ex-con / Trying to make good or When I go to your house / I feel like I'm / Casing the joint may prompt a grin or even a chuckle, they can't redeem a bleak album.
Despite the often creative surge of "isolationist" music, and the wealth of great music that has emerged from bedroom musicians recently, loneliness and alienation are usually not the healthiest conditions in which to create art or entertainment. When Callahan declares that Alone in my room / I feel like such a part of the community / But out on the streets / I feel like a robot by the river , the problem at the heart of Smog's music becomes painfully clear. C