Pitchfork

Like a Mountain Goats for the syrup-sipping set, Bill Callahan's mellow baritone a credible estimate of how John Darnielle's reedy keen would sound slowed to a chopped-and-screwed crawl. Lyrically, each musician sharpens the raw stuff of physical and emotional experience against his perception like a blade on a whetstone until only the essential edges-- furniture, streams and mountains; bitterness, pettiness, rage and redemption-- remain. But while Darnielle has slanted fuller and more direct over the years, Callahan has become smaller and more enigmatic. His most recent LP, A River Ain't Too Much to Love, found him settled deeply into a languid folk-waltz mode, his voice like something falling down a well, his once-convulsive exploratory sensibility turned calm and shamanistic.

Given the mossy inevitability that grows on Callahan's rock-steady voice, it seems only right that the Rock Bottom Riser EP-- featuring two tracks from the aforementioned album, two new songs, and two videos-- stays the course. Callahan's songs feel worn-in and effortless; his voice coasting across guitars so languid they sound wet, and his focus has turned from damnation to redemption. The songs are easy to summarize but difficult to concisely illuminate; they're like parachutes-- complex folds of family history, abstruse wisdom, and reverent naturalism packed tightly beneath plain, simple integuments. Always handy with aphorisms, Callahan by now is less the provocateur than the sage to whom abstractions like "God is a word/ And the argument ends there" and "Humiliation is good/ It means you believe in something" have become so transparent that they require no amplification.

No song on the album or this EP embodied redemption more fully than "Rock Bottom Riser", a glassy waltz dappled with Joanna Newsom's piano. Callahan conjures up subtle onomatopoeias: His voice sinks with a heavy plunk on the first half of the line "I am a rock/ Bottom riser," gently rises on the second; it dives as it intones the word "diving." The corporeal squeak of calluses on nylon strings asserts the body; the tight spidery arpeggio loosens and lightly opens; a voice that initially sounds like a weight trying to carry itself begins to drift buoyantly; and Callahan's body is pulled from "this mighty river." The "Rock Bottom Riser" video features trippy animation that's actually pretty mesmerizing, a swirling slideshow of vaguely Japanese brushwork flowing lithely over rice paper. "I Feel like the Mother of the World" is a long, sparkly exhalation, a shifty parable about empathy and responsibility. Its video finds Callahan playing a TV newscaster, arms-crossed and cocky in front of disaster footage, to Chloe Sevigny's harried and eye-patched maid. The juxtaposition of Sevigny's pathetic plight and Callahan's droll detachment is evocative of the cruel streak latent in his music, still haunted by a univocal and remote talking-head quality.

If the videos are compelling but inessential, the two new songs are far from toss-offs. "Bowery", where Callahan's voice blows in lovely gusts through silky guitars and small chimes, is whittled down to a white-hot emotional point: In beatific tones, Callahan watches his father try to find his bowery-bum grandfather's bones ("And to his trials I added my own," he admits), a multigenerational saga welling up tacitly between the sparsely rendered lines. And the easy hitch and roll of "Fool's Lament" finds Callahan in a slyly instructive mode, Aesop without the animals: As emerges through boasts like "I'm already ready/ For my great reward" and "I see things clearly/ Or not at all," Callahan's fool is exactly the kind he'll never be: The one who thinks the world is here to be mastered and suborned, rather than poked, prodded, caressed and observed.