- Record Label: Drag City
- Release Date: Apr 14, 2009
- Critic score
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- By date
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To that extent Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle seems like a return to older pastures--Callahan’s vocals again dominate, the production is more intimate, the songs themselves are again driven forward by the self-same rhythmic percussion and simple guitar riffs that became Callahan’s signature style over the last decade.
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MojoSometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle is a record of grand hopes and epic imagery, and powerful, uplifting music--the most accomplished of his 20-year career. [Apr 2009, p.102]
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While the dewy-eyed mood of his last album, "Woke on a Whaleheart," suggested Callahan's romantic entanglement with Joanna Newsom had turned his brain to mush, this miraculous return to form finds the artist formerly known as Smog losing his girl, but rediscovering his mojo.
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Eagle is as good as anything he's ever done.
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A quiet return to form.
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Consistently literate and full of the comfortable resonance of his unique voice, Eagle once again proves Callahan to be as ageless as the forest.
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The music is imaginative like a good dream--not the kind some of his older records intimated, the kind in which you’re walking but can’t move forward.
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What makes Eagle so strong is that the music stayed light, and those bucolic splashes of washed-out color contrast so well against Bill Callahan’s blues.
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It’s that prickliness that makes this record intriguing, and durable enough to reward repeat listens.
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Callahan sprinkles his world-weary perspective with enough wry humor to make the album pleasant and endearing.
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The entire first half of Eagle shows Callahan as a much more evolved and mature musician. He appears more comfortable expanding his musical space, and he exercises tasteful restraint with Beattie’s strings.
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Eagle is the ultimate cohesion of Callahan’s singular storytelling and bewitching delivery.
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2007's stellar Woke on a Whaleheart found him miles from Smog's lo-fi folk prophesies, the music revived, almost jubilant. Eagle's halfway there but sounds preoccupied, his stoic baritone never giving too much away.
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His vantage from Eagle is one of textured ambivalence; his images split and shimmer like double-exposures, immediately releasing an obvious meaning quickly followed by a subtler one that equivocates the first.
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As if in an attempt to gain the attributes of the album’s namesake bird, the songs on Eagle feel like they’re rising on thermals, shifting and soaring effortlessly where the wind takes them. And occasionally they dive right for your throat.
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He’s resonating some true beauty here; entirely lost in his nostalgic feelings and openly retrospective about where he has been, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle is absolutely beautiful.
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This may not have any of the hard-hitting jabs his best Smog records had, but I Wish We Were An Eagle is a subtler, more bittersweet heartbreak.
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It is perhaps a seminal new chapter in Callahan's oeuvre of higher yet lo-fi outsider music.
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If "Woke On A Whaleheart" (2007) was the cuckoo clock, Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle‘s Callahan’s triumphant Renaissance.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 27 out of 32
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Mixed: 3 out of 32
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Negative: 2 out of 32
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May 1, 2012
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JoannaApr 28, 2009One of the best albums of 2009 for me.
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GrantMacMillanApr 24, 2009Outstanding.