Smog - Julius Caesar

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Free Music Notes for Julius Caesar

Free Music Review: Up the garden path
Hit: 4 Stars

My first experience of Julius Caesar was somewhat bewildering - I wondered how someone who had written a song of such claustrophobic melancholy as that in which Bathysphere is drenched could make a record that on first listening seemed to be a farrago of smart-arsed tomfoolery. I soon learnt, however, that blithely making such an assumption had been the easy way out. On scraping away the veneer of snide wordplay and toppling the daunting sonic barrier that the evidently budget recording had erected around the record, I began to fully realise Callahan's gift as a songwriter and the strange and terrible power that his music with which his music would eventually grip my heart.

The journey began with Chosen One (which, it could be argued, is possibly the record's most accessible piece) and continued by way of the eerily suffocating Stalled On The Tracks and the heart-on-sleeve simplicity of Golden, finally reaching its conclusion with my realisation that, goodness me, while I Am Star Wars! and When The Power Goes Out might be arrant musical pranks, they were nonetheless fine songs. I in fact should to like to take this opportunity to heartily exhort God to bless Mr Callahan for, by gum, he has a sense of humour that is a welcome blessing in today's world of pretentious artistes and that has survived seemingly intact from the early days of Julius Caesar until the present (q.v. his hilarious explanation of Knock, Knock's cover art - featuring a fierce-looking feline against a background of lightning - as designed to appeal to his teenage audience).

While Julius Caesar may for me lack the jaw-dropping emotional clout of such works as The Doctor Came At Dawn, Kicking A Couple Around or Red Apple Falls, it is yet an album that I treasure and into which I delve time and again. I have yet to find a record that so deftly admixes witty cynicism with brittle, uneasy melancholy.

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