This Week's Album Releases: SMOG Knock Knock Domino

THE NONCHALANT fatalism that marked Bill "Smog" Callahan's previous records continues to pervade Knock Knock, although his musical palette has suddenly expanded in strange new directions. It is Bill's typically obtuse attempt to make an album for teenagers: "... starting with the cover art, with its lightning and wildcats - those seem like things that teenagers identify with". Whether they'll identify with the music is another matter. Callahan's original "sadcore" stylings are still featured on songs such as "I Could Drive Forever" and "River Guard", but the sheer diversity - not to mention perversity - of his approaches makes the album hard to grasp at one hearing. The best way to describe it is probably as the country album The Velvet Underground never got round to recording, though even they might find the gap between "Let's Move to the Country" and "No Dancing" too big to span.

Bill also turns his hand to psychedelic garage rock in "Held", though the languor of "Sweet Treat", with its shreds of guitar dancing like insects in the last rays of sunlight, remains his true forte. Despite the recurring theme of movement, there's a strange stasis about the album, as if Callahan experienced the displacement in songs such as "Hit the Ground Running", "Let's Move to the Country" and "I Could Drive Forever" less as a physical than a spiritual sensation. Introspective and reclusive, dry and elusive, this is life in the inside lane, in every sense.