Dongs Of Sevotion

What's this, Bill Callahan's comedy hour? Not exactly. The flippancy of the whimsical title is just there to lull you into a state of joviality before the punches come raining down. It's just that this being Smog, there's no show without punchlines.

It may be the laughter of the damned, but that makes it all the more vital - like a drowning man clutching a rubber ring. 'Bloodflow', for instance, is guillotine humour, where in the course of depicting acts of unspeakable violence, a chorus of All-American cheerleaders invade the song and start spelling out the title and chanting verses which comically make the phrase 'tete-a-tete' rhyme with 'machete'. It's as unexpected and as audacious as the children's choir Callahan used on last year's Knock Knock and makes you wonder just what the hell he's gonna come up with next - a duet with Barney, perhaps?

The album kicks off in quite unorthodox fashion with 'Justice Aversion', an unusually political song that sounds like something Bobby Womack might have recorded in a bad mood, its descending keyboard chords mirroring the depressed sigh of its subject - inner city blues.

The next track, 'Dress Sexy At My Funeral', is probably the definitive Smog moment, the apotheosis of everything he's been striving to achieve. Speaking from beyond the grave, Callahan exhorts his wife to present herself in a manner she never did when he was alive, before going on to recall the instances of their most racy sexual encounters - including in the cemetery where he's being buried, an image which is so rich, so poignant, so suggestive that one feels whole novels unravelling from it.

This sense of absence lurking in even the most present moments is one of Callahan's main themes - it's evoked again in 'Nineteen', a haunted, haunting song where the speaker recalls losing his virginity. But there's a twist in the tale. Here, indifference becomes a form of violence, and by the end it's hard to know who's hurting the most. Smog: they make the dongs that make the whole world ring.

Bill Callahan has delivered his third masterpiece in three years.