His eccentric travelogue transports listeners

Bill Callahan walked on stage at Johnny Brenda's on Saturday in a pin-striped, blue and white seersucker suit, looking like a traveling troubadour, or perhaps as if he'd just stepped out from behind an antique ice cream counter.

The songs on his new album, Apocalypse, the fourth released under his own name after more than a decade recording (often by himself) as Smog, form a kind of eccentric travelogue, a record of a journey that goes nowhere and everywhere.

Callahan begins and ends the album by singing from the perspective of a cattle drover, finally concluding, on "One Fine Morning," "I am a part of the road - the hardest part."

Actually, that's not quite the conclusion. As he does on Apocalypse, Callahan brought the song to a close on Saturday night by repeating the phrase "DC 4-5-0" - the album's catalog number. It's a pleasingly puzzling maneuver, one you can read as simply free-associative playfulness or a way of establishing the song's place in time.

The games Callahan plays with his personal history were repeated on a national scope with "America!" Over a simple pattern - bass note, chord, bass note, chord - ironically more evocative of Eastern European music than anything homegrown, Callahan riffled through the country's back pages, inserting his finger at random points along the way.

He sang its "grand and golden" praises, then idly observed, "I watched David Letterman / in Australia."

He drafted Kris Kristofferson and Johnny Cash into an imaginary armed forces, then rattled off a list of the nation's military failures, before wrapping up, "Everyone's allowed a past they don't care to mention."

Callahan's impossibly deep voice lends the songs a built-in wryness, as if every word were spoken under his breath. (That his band consisted only of an electric guitar player and a drummer meant there was no bass to outdo him.)

For nearly two hours in front of a sold-out crowd, Callahan spun meandering tales that led into diaphanous instrumental disquisitions or else simply fizzled out, as if he'd decided to grab a seat by the side of the road and watch the world zip by for a bit.

But when you're in the company of such an engaging traveling companion, you lose sight of the fact that you're not going anywhere.