Nearly 20 years ago, Bill Callahan was a lo-fi maverick, composing largely instrumental and occasionally brutal cassette tapes, indicating a similar evolution as fellow singer-songwriter staple John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats. Under the pre-Oberst one man band name Smog, Callahan began his rise of prolificacy as an ever-unfolding musical force, experimenting with both the stripped and the orchestrated with steady degrees of excellence. All the way to the wordy and whiskey-soaked A River Ain't Too Much To Love in 2005, Callahan remained a niche figure, forever under-appreciated in a wider sense but with a cult-phenom level of indie-snob fanaticism. Dropping the Smog in favour of a true to self personalisation, Woke On A Whaleheart finds Bill Callahan at his most arrangement savvy and emotionally fulfilled, ditching sombre for philosophical, while retaining an air of his ever elusive mystery.  

When Callahan proclaims, "Have faith in wordless knowledge," during 'From The Rivers To The Oceans' it is nearly impossible to believe him, not for lack of a convincing tone, but rather because his own lyrical insights provide such a bare, fundamental enlightenment, however inscrutable. Ambiguous in meaning, there is a warmness to Callahan's baritone that, when combined with the starkness of his lyrical construction, allows you to feel the words on a fundamental level – knowing what he's saying without always knowing what he means. And though he may step toward existential, one is left with the feeling that Callahan would never ask a listener to overlook his prose, even in obscurity. It's a very particular skill, something The National's Matt Berninger (a fellow baritone) has mastered as of late, and an indie-rock, even lo-fi, tradition back to Phil Elvrum's earliest work or Calvin Johnson's (there's that baritone again) work with Beat Happening. 

On 'The Wheel' Callahan sings, "Time for my meal of wood/To make my home lord/In a stable spoke lord/Inside a turning wheel bound for good," and a literal listener is left dizzied as if spun around like that very wheel. But yet the song never feels arduous and succeeds on its instrumental familiarity and measured delivery. Just as soon, to pull the listener close again and squash the risk of alienation, Callahan may also rely on a standard such as the "man as tree" simile, complete with fresh wordplay, when he sings, "Sycamore got to grow down to grow up/Young roots hold the soil like a baby's first cup," on the relatively upbeat 'Sycamore' with its duelling clean electric guitars. 

Often country or folk tinged, Woke On A Whaleheart finds Callahan up to his old tricks, but closer to his middle period, like the richly instrumental Jim O'Rourke collaboration Julius Caesar, incorporating strings, Wurlitzer, full kit percussion and even synthesizer to flesh out the song's rustic core. And still, the results are temperate, denoting that Callahan himself may know nothing of excess. Just as he refuses to overbear his compositions (with arrangement assistance from the famed Neil Hagerty), the self restraint audible in Callahan's deep-bellied sing/speak voice saves the listener from the crushingly melancholy fragility heard in a fellow troubadours such as Elliot Smith. Certainly Whaleheart counts itself among the least brooding Callahan projects, that is not to say that a vague and regretful longing won't escape now and again – once a pessimist, always a pessimist. But on album closer 'A Man Needs A Woman Or A Man To Be A Man' when Callahan reverts to plaintively admitting, "I don't know if I can uphold it on my own/I don't know if I'm to be trusted," the chinks in the armour prove him fallible and mortal, while still consistently sounding tried and wise. After all, without these slivers of doubt, who would dare have faith in his brand of worded knowledge?