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Saying Rain on Lens is better than the two Smog records that preceded it — Dongs of Sevotion and 'Neath the Puke Tree — is feint praise. Those two labored efforts were low points to rival Sewn to the Sky at the ass-end of Bill Callahan's ever-growing Smog discography. The latest longplayer from Callahan finds him doing something like the righting of a sinking ship. Rain on Lens isn't awful, but boy, is it a long way from The Doctor Came at Dawn. Or Wild Love. However, given that Callahan is the most favorite child of the daggy Drag City boys' club, you figure he's going to be making records until the cows come home, and they're bound to be more and more didactic by the day, so, you're left hearing Killer Cally murmur all those under-his-breath jokes, somehow still playing guitar in spite of the fact he's got one finger stuck in the leaky dike of his Smog construction. Recorded with a neat three-piece backing band that includes Rick Rizzo on wailing guitar, Rain on Lens lumbers with the buzzy, picked-guitar gait that's recently become Callahan's staple; making for a kind of self-reflexive white-man's blues with a nasty comic underside, deliberately shitty tone, and a sombre, somnolent pace. There are occasional flourishes — the handclaps of "Natural Decline," the shrieking violin of "Dirty Pants," the jaunty horns of the natty "Revanchism" — but for the most part it works in the same dreary shades. One could spend a long time dissecting the always-amusing lyrics — the two-part title track likely written about his experience in making Léos Carax's "Pola X" — but on these recent records it sounds like Callahan hardly cares, so why should we?
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