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MojoSep 19, 2013Dream River may be Callahan's most beguiling album yet. [Oct 2013, p.89]
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Sep 17, 2013Dream River doesn’t chew an inch of scenery; instead it dwells in knowing glances and haunted whispers.
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Dec 30, 2013Dream River is probably as evocative a record as Callahan has ever made, and that really is saying a great deal when considering his extensive back catalog.
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Sep 18, 2013You sense that he’s walked past those doors, revising his ideas, waiting, looking for something. He’s found it. Listen through his astonishing new album, Dream River, and you will hear, lined up neatly, his trademarks.
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Sep 18, 2013Dream River is required reading, without a doubt.
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Sep 17, 2013With eight songs that unfurl to 40 minutes, it’s impeccably crafted and plays off a mercurial tension between Callahan’s voice--a parched yet resonant baritone--and the lush arrangements that envelop it.
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UncutSep 11, 2013Dream River [is] among Callahan's very best. [Oct 2013, p.63]
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Sep 24, 2013Dream River is as evocative a record as he’s ever made and that’s saying quite a lot.
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Sep 16, 2013In a world that increasingly rewards short attention spans and encourages distractions, Callahan’s music is well worth taking the time to patiently absorb.
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Sep 20, 2013Musically, Dream River sticks calmly to understated Americana, generally managing to pull off Lambchop’s neat one-inch punch trick--seemingly effortless and gentle, only to echo with far more drama and beautifully powerful resonance.
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Sep 17, 2013At its core, this is a record about accepting and even embracing the smallness of human life, and how difficult that can be, given our damnably innate sense of adventure, ambition, and restlessness.
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Oct 30, 2013A deft, balanced and measured record.
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Q MagazineOct 11, 2013Imagery and music intertwine elegantly on Small Plane and The Sing and if it's not up there with Callahan's very best work, Dream River still runs deep. [Nov 2013, p.102]
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Sep 27, 2013There is no such thing as a bad moment on Dream River. That being said, I wish that he chose to use a different percussion instrument than bringing back the claves for back-to-back “Summer Painter” and “Seagull”, neither of which use the instrument as well as “The Sing” did.
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Sep 25, 2013The result is something stranger and more off-kilter than either of its predecessors, but equally distinctive.
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Sep 25, 2013It’s subtly more adventurous, and certainly scarier, in the way that even mundane things are always scarier in dreams, filtered through a disordered mind, revealing painful truths in unexpected places.
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Sep 19, 2013Here, we hear hints of funk, jazz, Americana and folk--and before you know it, the album’s ingrained itself.
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Sep 19, 2013Thanks to the rich clarity of his delivery and the prominent place that the vocals take in the mix, Callahan’s lyrics cast a long shadow over the rest of the album, allowing the literary connotations to carry over into analysis.
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Sep 18, 2013Dream River flows from one track to the next, with a similarity of tempo that makes it play like eight movements of one 40-minute song. But a few moments stand out.
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Sep 17, 2013There’s plenty to chew on with his latest, Dream River. And that’s just the lyrics, whose weightiness is given more heft by his controlled baritone.
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Sep 16, 2013Of late he’s adopted a sweeter, eddying Americana, and Dream River takes a turn to lush country-soul.
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Sep 16, 2013The arrangements on Dream River are almost as eloquent as his lyrics.
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Sep 16, 2013Though his appeal remains frustratingly specialist, with each release it becomes clearer that Callahan is the natural successor to Leonard Cohen.
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Sep 11, 2013In its strongest moments--though there are no real weak moments to speak of--Dream River presents a compelling, gorgeous sonic world in which to get blissfully lost.
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Sep 26, 2013Callahan's search for meaning becomes fully realized when he's finally connected to another.
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MagnetSep 19, 2013Their scope isn't quite as broad as 2011's Apocalypse or as emotionally complex as 2009's Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle, but they are full of sharp observations and wit. [No. 102, p.54]
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Sep 17, 2013His music is loose and rustic, his writing skirts the heart of the matter instead of bulldozing into it, and his careful deadpan imbues everyday statements with almost mystical resonance.
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Sep 17, 2013For a record preoccupied with usefulness, it’s unsurprising that that’s the case. There’s no room for artifice; he’s got to tell it like it is, because the telling is the moving, and the moving is the riding, and the riding is the living.
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Sep 16, 2013With Dream River, fans already know what to expect from the man lyrically, and it can't be argued with qualitatively. When you place those lyrics in the context of something so subtly adventurous musically, the result is both engaging and seductive.
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Sep 16, 2013It is a great record, at times. But when the elements don’t quite chime it suffers.
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Sep 13, 2013Bill Callahan's follow-up to 2011's gorgeous Apocalypse finds him in the company of a small, discreet band, whose gentle shuffles are coloured mostly by guitar, fiddle and flute, as his muse flits haphazardly about him. [The Independent scored this a 3/5 in the actual printed edition not 5/5 as seen on its online edition]
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Sep 11, 2013With the lightweight numbers up front and the centrepiece dominating the lacklustre cast around it, the album is surely one of the most uneven and unsatisfying in recent memory from Callahan.
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Under The RadarSep 11, 2013While the songs on Dream River aren't what anyone would consider pedestrian, they don't feel particularly daring or weighty. [Aug-Sep 2013, p.87]
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 20 out of 23
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Mixed: 2 out of 23
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Negative: 1 out of 23
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Sep 20, 2013
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Mar 7, 2014
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Sep 20, 2013