Bill Callahan: Have Fun With God

As the title suggests, this record is the ghost of Bill Callahan’s Dream River, drifting hypnotic across the astral plane and breaking through the white light into whatever realm lies beyond. This record is dubbed out, cosmic, Lynchian—it is the swaying, omniscient pines Agent Cooper drives past, mesmerized, in the Twin Peaks pilot as he wonders aloud, “Oh Diane, I almost forgot. Got to find out what kind of trees these are. They’re really something. …Sheriff, what kind of fantastic trees have you got growing around here?”

Have Fun With God makes me want to take acid. Not metaphorically, not as a literary device in a record review intended to convey some kind of abstract notion of psychedelia. It makes me want to evaporate the self and distill it just as Callahan distilled Dream River’s eight songs into these new amoeba-fluid, shape-shifting dub versions.