It was the first time I had fallen in love with an album for what it wasn't rather than for what it was. It wasn’t poppy. It didn’t have a great beat. It wasn’t easy to dance to. Maybe I tried: maybe I didn’t. And yet, it hooked me even without any catchy hooks. It begins hopeful, intimate and sincere. “Let’s move to the country,” it says, “just you and me.” It leaves all of those popular sentiments behind. It sets off to do something different—something unspectacular. Not the big city. Not fame or money. This one seeks privacy. Bill Callahan will let you listen to the album but that's it. Nothing else. You can never truly own it. It will always keep to itself. It wants you to listen, but barely. It's not begging—only offering.
Knock, Knock is not much of an album. And that’s a good thing. Consider what would be left of your favorite album if the music and the lyrics, the rhythm and the rhyme, all sonance were somehow removed. No melody, no beat, no music at all. Is there something, anything left? What Smog does with this album is take feelings and ideas and barely—meagerly packages them up. There are more feelings here than music and they are thinly veiled. But don’t mistake the dearth of pretty packaging for lack of substance. With this one the music is almost unimportant.
Not minimal but simple. No gimmicks. No clichés. No monumental riffs or melodies that stick around. In the end it allows you to leave and forget and it doesn’t care to know where you’re going. It doesn’t hold it against you if you don’t want to stay. “Bitterness is the lowest sin,” it claims. There’s an old proverb that asks, how do you keep the one you love? You don’t. Knock, Knock is one of those mysteries. You know the ones. It's the album that when caught listening to it the intruders spouts judgmental discontent. They'll never understand anyway. Why even try to explain it? You can listen to it, but that's it.
