Post No Bills

Because Bill Callahan, who records under the name Smog, delivers his songs in a detached, low voice that's more posthypnotic suggestion than singing, folks lazily compare him to Leonard Cohen or Lou Reed. But Callahan lacks Reed's grit and Cohen's grace; his work employs neither the leathery colic that makes Reed the missing link between Dion and Cohen nor the verbal precision of a true song poet. What he has in common with Reed and Cohen -- or Bob Dylan, Mark Kozalek or Mark Eitzel, name your poison -- is unabashed self-absorption.

In fact, if Callahan's work smells of genius, it's a cologne, not the b.o. given off by someone sweating out, say, "First We Take Manhattan." Heard in a stingy frame of mind, Callahan's albums can sound pretentious, meandering, slovenly. Callahan isn't a poet; he's a comedian. Not, despite the underground cachet of working on the same label as Will Oldham, the crying-on-the-inside kind of laugh riot, either. Callahan is the Steven Wright or Emo Phillips of tempo-free dirge-and-roll, a guy working backward from a unique payoff to get the setup right. An anachronism, never cutting-edge, though frequently mistaken for it. A funny guy, a surprisingly insightful guy but, all the same, a guy telling jokes.

It takes a comedian to insist on conducting interviews only by e-mail when the instrument on which the questions are received and the answers dispatched is not a computer but a pager. (Callahan does not own a computer.) Whether it's shyness, disdain or the dread of being misquoted that prevents Callahan from indulging in conversation, the results are witty, frustrating and, finally, irrelevant to his witty, frustrating albums (also slow; typically, you can absorb the whole Smog catalog a couple of times while waiting for an electronic reply from Callahan). Albums that, played in a frame of mind that's anything greater than stingy, feature some permanently haunting moments.

One of those moments, a sort of "Smog Moving Over the Face of the Waters" that pairs looped Moby-like piano and guitar arpeggios with drums like the 1812 Overture's cannon fire, ends Callahan's 2000 disc, Dongs of Sevotion. "Permanent Smile" is the Syd Barrett version of Revelations; Seven waves of insects make families in my skin, Callahan sings before concluding, Oh God, I never, never ask why. He doesn't answer "why" a whole lot, either.

Consider "Strayed," in which Callahan's narrator confesses he has loved in haste and played the parts of alley cat and bumblebee to your panther and your wasp. It's a stark mea culpa: I know I have strayed, he sings calmly. Is a musician more likely to break someone's heart than, say, an accountant? Asked that question, Callahan responds, "I went with an accountant once, just out of curiosity. Numbers were all I cared about for a time. She was sloppy in her personal accounts, exacting in her professional ones. She did not care for money except as a number. We both got wrapped up in numbers for a while." A parable, or a joke without a punch line? It all depends on whether Callahan's answer would have been different had the question used "zookeeper" instead of "accountant" as its for-instance.

"Strayed" also includes the most rib-tickling put-down in the Smog canon: I never thought I'd be one of those men/With pin-ups on their wall, Callahan sings. I thought that was just mechanics. But Mr. Sensitive has a Hugh Hefner streak. Asked about the polygamist on trial in Utah this month, Callahan says, "I think they should leave that guy alone. Who can blame him for wanting to surround himself with as many women as possible? He got greedy, though. He had the wives, then he wanted to be a star." Callahan says he doesn't know Steve Earle's music (the two songwriters have in common a love of Michael Ondaatje's book Coming Through Slaughter), but damned if Callahan doesn't at least keep up with CNN's quirkier stories.

More paradoxical is Callahan's answer to a question about Chicago's indie scene. The city is home to a number of alt-country labels and the flagship bands of each, leaving out Ryan Adams and Jeff Tweedy, who take home bigger paychecks from bigger companies. Chicago also hosts a surprising proportion of shoegazing proggers, such as Tortoise, whose John McEntire and Jeff Parker show up on Dongs of Sevotion. If reading Callahan's first line of "Devotion" (There are some terrible gossips in this town) too literally is unkind to his adopted home base, his reply to a question about the lyric and the city is defensive and hazy: "What's an insular scene and is anything really so succinct, that is to say dead and over? Chicago has no bearing on me, or my productions. I have friends there, and the others wear phony pirate suits, monocles, dungarees, ironic belt buckles. I can answer this question about as well as if I'd never heard of Chicago." Or if Chicago had never heard of Callahan.