Bill Callahan – Resuscitate! – Album Review
by Killian Laher

Those who have seen Bill Callahan live will realise that these days, his live experience is night and day to the recorded versions.  His recent albums have consisted of hard-carved, vaguely folk songs.  This is a recording of a concert last year in Chicago, with a setlist drawn largely from 2022’s YTILAER album.  Here the songs are much jammier with a prominent if not entirely welcome saxophone courtesy of Dustin Laurenzi, and Matt Kinsey’s guitar doing its ‘all over the place’ dance across the songs.

Every song is expanded on and drawn out to endless lengths, Naked Souls and Planets last nearly 10 minutes while Coyotes lasts nearly 13 minutes!  He revisits an old (Smog) song from 2001 in Keep Your Steady Friends Around but otherwise, it’s more recent material here.  Tracks like Partition and Drover are expanded, heightening the tension but ultimately feeling overlong.  Pigeons maintains the charm of the recorded version by restricting the instrumentation to accompaniment rather than dominance.

There’s just too much going on to process at times.  If the recorded versions are, by and large, nimble, however zen Bill Callahan comes across, these workouts are a bit… flabby.  For a man at the top of his game, releasing some of the finest albums of this century, this is an unnecessary indulgence.