Smog – ‘Knock Knock’
We’ve all thought about moving to the country at one time or another. And the moment when you genuinely think about it always sounds like ‘Let’s Move to the Country’, the opening track to the glorious Smog album Knock Knock. The modulating optimism but sparse vagary is a mark of the album’s triumph, where music is used to channel the emotive resonance of the album’s little vignettes like how fine prose pairs with a story, rather than simply being an orchestrated melody.
All the songs sound like they’re supposed to, which might not seem like the most glowing praise on paper, but it is a rare thing to find. The songwriter Mano McLaughlin once said, “The song is all,” meaning that when you write a track, that idea dictates everything that follows—you can’t think about whether it sounds like Revolver or it isn’t quite as muscular as the previous one you wrote, you just have to follow wherever that song goes.
Few albums have ever seemed to heed that advice quite like Knock Knock. That doesn’t make it a perfect record. Almost by virtue of that sincere pursuit, it makes it imperfect as the sound continually wavers from one track to the next, and occasionally, a track will guide Bill Callahan (the man behind Smog) down the wrong path. But it does make it a work of notable singularity, capable of creating moments of such honest encapsulation that they will endure for a lifetime.
There is a sense that the opener was recorded by a kitchen sink, the ambient reminiscence of walking around the streets where you grew up on ‘Teenage Spaceship’. There’s also the weird mystery of whatever ‘Sweet Treat’ is about. The feelings locked into these melodies and the way they play out feel endlessly relatable.
And yet, there is also a strange obscurity about the album, matched by its inscrutable and slightly garish cover. But unlike the cover, that slight obfuscation only adds to the beauty — a beauty that imperfectly embodies the human comedy in its own little way. There’s hope, love, loss, moving on, anger, moving back, and myriad other emotions and happenings in a lifetime, all contained in ten strange songs that some people might dismiss as rubbish in a single listening, and they might even have a point.
But for fans of Callahan, with his warbling voice and penchant for repetition, the album has a homely feel, like a photo album. It’s too bittersweet at times to be blissful but too sincere and visceral to ever become dull.
Sweet and serene, even in its brief heavy moments, Knock Knock is a rare novelistic record that proves larger than its humble parts, pining for you to explore the depth beneath the vignettes and find your own corroborations as you plunge.
