I just checked and as of right now we're adjacent to a blog providing nothing but screencaps of arabic porn.
You will note the proximity of the "flag blog" button to the one providing the "next blog" function: I believe I have discovered why.
One time, a long time ago, I said I'd review a certain album for you. What I meant to say was, I'd love to review a particularly pretty album for you sometime in late Spring.
If you know me then you've probably heard me going gang busters about the band Califone the odd time, especially in recent weeks when something clicked inside of me and the ultra-hip americana band pulled a dragonforce directly into third place on my audioscrobbler, up from their previous position of, like, seventieth. I did put 2006's Roots & Crowns somewhere up in the top ten best albums I heard all year, back when I was into that sort of thing, but the thing you have to understand is that sometimes I even know more than my self. That is, I knew this was a fantastic album even though I had yet to really figure out why.
This is a band so mired in sheer talent, so immediately creative in their exploration of a well-worn canvas that the only band I can reasonably liken them to with any hope of getting my meaning across is feckin' Radiohead. I am thinking this is high enough praise to gain your attention, yes?
So, if the phrase "ultra-hip americana" has soiled your mood, please endeavour to make it to the end of my article.
Roots & Crowns is about the prettiest gust of music you're likely to hear in a good long while, it is an album which finds itself hunkering down at the mathematical convergence between beauty and its less popular uncle, substance, and setting up a rustic, dilapidated cabin therein. While the extent of my own knowledge vis a vis the genre of Americana prior to diving into Califone's ridiculously prolific output consisted of all the Johnny Cash I've ever heard, which is embarassingly little, I can safely relate to you that this music is the aural manifestation of a sunset. Frontman Tim Rutili and his merry, allegedly huge cast of conspirators are not so much informed by man's nature and nature's man - if you take my meaning - as they are the gleaming avatars of these most provocative ideals. It sounds grandiose, and it is. Roots & Crowns glides over and embraces topics as smart and provocative as martyrdom, familial loss, loving imperfection, and some vicariously unnameable things with both strength and real sweetness and it could be, in short, country music. But it's far from being so simple, which is what has got me so hot and bothered, if you've noticed. What's set Califone apart, at least for the indie set, is spectacular and gorgeously realized execution and a delicate skirting of cliche. The expression of such common, albeit importantly common themes is so effortlessly performed and beautifully produced on this, their ninth studio release, that the music is pure joy of sound before the surfeit of genuine intellect that is each song's content becomes apparent.
This not just some guys with acoustic instruments in a barn somewhere, this is an extraordinarily modern piece of music. I mean, they have their acoustic guitars most of the time, sure. But they've also brought a suite of electronic and studio-borne tricks at the ready and they use them as artists should.
Now I do in fact have one caveat about the record, and it is its insufferably slow beginning. The four ditties that eat up Roots & Crowns' first fifteen minutes, while pretty in their own right, are easily the most lackluster on the album. They drag, and offer the least by way of the creativity and emotive impact the band is capable of. Opener Pink & Sour is dark and inexplicably electronic, a drawn-out moody affair that's intriguing as a first track, but scarier than most of the rest of the songs without much impact. Spider's House and Sunday Noises are very nearly by-the-numbers country pieces which slink by with a fair bit of simple charm but little presence. If there were little more to the album than what this first act suggest, it wouldn't be worth half the praise that's been heaped upon it.
But things pick up with the inscrutably muscular folk of A Chinese Actor and don't fail to extract the breath from your chest for the next seven tracks.
Our Kitten Sees Ghosts maps out the real tense of the record, a breezey mess of acoustic guitar and rustic soul that absolutely worships the clarity and beauty of sound possible with such classic tools. Feedback and a perfectly produced atmosphere of resonance glimmer across most every bar, a sound that's simultaneously all Califone's own and yet immediately and endlessly attractive. The vibrant marriage of simple, clunky percussion, powerful acoustic radiance, and veritable chasms of productive nuance and electronic noise shimmer and glide across the whole of this record's remainder, not a single note out of place nor a mood imperfectly delivered. Tim Rutili's voice has the consistency of warm syrup and is applied as such. His isn't exactly an American drawl, but the man sings good and slow with a purpose. Better than this, and to do no insult to the man's thick and golden voice, the production of tracks like The Orchids and Burned By The Christians and half a dozen other benefit enormously from the utterly perfect layering of his diligent vocal tracks. There couldn't be more than two or three adorning each song, but the effect is uniformly spectacular, compounding and detailing a simple voice's stark emotion and weary intelligence with sincere elegance.
This is pretty music. But sugary it ain't.
Latterday tracks Black Metal Valentine and Rose Petal Ear - especially Rose Petal Ear - revel in the sort of deep country gothicism which'll raise the hair on the back of your neck in any stretch of unkempt woods. The seamlessly brilliant pairing of tinny, high strung acoustic guitar with sudden swaths of distorted, down-tuned electric bass positively creep me out, in the loveliest sense of the phrase, and realize the potency of the field of music this band's mining without succumbing even the least bit to repetition. Black Metal Valentine leans even more heavily on bare electronics, and seems to grow out of a place between the haunted house of Climbing Up The Walls and the woods around it. It slinks along under foggy vocals and eerily tapping percussion to create some of the most stunning moments on the album, the whole spectrum of dissonant effects coming together in absurdly moving collisions of sound. When Mister Rutili deigns to put falsetto into his songs, as with these ones, he does so with the precision of a surgeon and with the style of the mad variety.
Penultimate track 3 Legged Animal packs all the melancholy, impossible hope, and talent this band possesses into four minutes of flawless pop-folk, the kind of sleepy, sun-on-your-face gem that should woo literally every human being on the planet. Every band has that song which any fan will instantly recommend to anyone halfway interested: this is that song. Easily the most upbeat song to be found on Roots & Crowns, this beauty barely affects a canter its whole length and when Tim Rutili croons, he's completely sincere and masterfully powerful without so much as raising his voice - it doesn't need more. While album closer If You Would breaks out a strident, ethereal piano for the ultimate in swarthy bring-downs, very much the country brethren of Pyramid Song, it's not so much noteworthy for its own pretty, somewhat plain effects, as for the finality of its hazy fade away. The all instrumental outro which constitutes the last handful of minutes of it and the album movingly affect a summary, a microcosm of everything that's just been heard. Strings pick up strains of hope, perversity, and ineffable sparks of fear. It's a breath from the unknown, built on the simply beautiful altar of the earth.
It's very much like a rickety Yellow House you might know, left wide open, abandoned, and wrought with unspeakable meaning. It's the soundtrack to the imagery built out of the countryside we all know, rarely visit, and immediately identify with both as an endless ghost of spindly trees and monstrous shanties, and as the cradel of each of our lives.
Like I said, it sounds grandiose, and it is.
