MONDOmagazine

Calexico
Carried To Dust
Touch and Go Records, 2008

By Crow Winters

Carried to Dust, the new album from longtime indie-rock institution Calexico, is music with a capital “M.” Calexico’s shtick is being well read. Joey Burns was studying music in college when the band was formed, and if the mishmash of culture-heavy genres is any indication, he’s never really stopped studying it. This is either a highlight of the band’s music or a detracting element.  There are a ton of country-friendly slide guitars, mariachi horns, hushed storyteller vocals, and even some western whistling. Sound familiar? This more or less sums up the band’s career, and it’s hardly new territory in the world of subverting Americana.

Calexico’s last release, the 2006 album Garden Wire, was the first time the band really stepped outside of themselves; perhaps due to shock, Carried to Dust sounds like a retreat back to the safe house. It’s sure to please longtime fans, particularly those put off by Garden Wire, but it’s likely not to get anyone that didn’t drink the Kool-Aid the first time around. This album is unapologetically lush, mid-tempo, beautiful on paper but sometimes cold in practice. It’s the sound of a band creatively withdrawing into their collective shell.

Which doesn’t mean that there aren’t great songs here. Album closer “Contention City” is one incredible mood piece: dark, haunting, and arresting, this song singlehandedly takes back the term “soundscape” from the electronica laptop musicians that have hogged it for too long. In contrast, the instrumental “El Gatillo (Trigger Revisited)” is an invigorating gallop that breaks up the tension of mid-tempo pieces that slur together around it. “Two Silver Trees” and “Man Made Lake” are undoubtedly the album’s easiest tracks to tout: they have a melody and snarl that stick with you, and their big choruses and whirling guitars are dizzying and satisfying.

When some of the tracks don’t work, it’s no fault of the musicianship — it has more to do with imagination. Joey Burns’s voice suffers from his desire to be too perfect, too in control, and too wispy, which makes songs like “The News About William,” “Red Blooms,” and “Slowness” ineffective and frequently impenetrable. He has a self-imposed lack of versatility and overabundance of seriousness that makes these songs ultimately forgettable. The album also feels unusually long, even though it’s only forty-five minutes. That forty-five minutes is stretched through fifteen tracks, and it’s easy to think that they could’ve axed some of the weaker tracks and stretched some of their better ideas, such as “Inspiracion” and “Fractured Air,” past the three-minute mark.

Your approval of the new Calexico album will say a lot about what you look for in music. Carried to Dust is ultimately rigid and history obsessed, but the songwriters’ love for what they do is simply undeniable, as is their craft and execution. Those looking for music that looks forwards instead of backwards, however, should be advised to look elsewhere.

Bodies of Water
A Certain Feeling
Secretly Canadian, 2008

By Crow Winters

The Bodies of Water website claims that the band’s sound “draws from a number of disparate traditions, combining the metaphysical intensity of gospel, the primitive gusto of punk rock, the earnest idiosyncracy of American folk, the sonic inclusiveness of tropicalia, the planned jamming of prog, and the sincere melodrama of musical theatre.” Needless to say, that’s a mouthful, and, if the new record A Certain Feeling is any indication, a pretty big dressing-up of what is essentially simple 4/4 indie prog rock.

A Certain Feeling manages the alarming feat of sounding both overworked and technically unimpressive. Which isn’t to say that the band’s self-proclaimed trump card of gospel-inspired multi-tiered vocals don’t lead way to some disarmingly beautiful moments scattered throughout the record. Opener track “Gold, Tan, Peach and Grey” starts out with a bass-and-vocal choir that reminds me of a simpler spiritual cousin of “Autumn’s Child” by Captain Beefheart —certainly not a bad thing to be compared to. Unfortunately, as is the problem with most of the record, by the time the song’s true buildup starts, the band stops trying. Although all the songs move through several distinctive parts during their six-minute-plus running time (on average), certainly a feature of prog’s more complicated entries, nearly all of them are simple regurgitations of indie-rock clichés. It’s hard to even compliment the arguably gospel-inspired harmonies when they are so often shouted as anthems over forgettable chord rock.

It’s the kind of stuff that I’m sure makes for great live shows — the energy here is obvious, so it’s a shame that the poor songwriting detracts from the band’s enthusiasm. The songs that should cause a frenzied rush in the listener fall flat on record, due to a lack of editing and incredibly unimaginative production qualities. To balance out the “rockers,” the band has included some directionless dirges such as “Only You,” “The Mud Gapes Open,” and “Keep Me On,” which are the closest things to musical Xanax I’ve heard in a long time. I can’t even comment on the lyrical quality of most of the album because I lost hope after the female vocalist groaned, “In my eyes/Only you,” and variations thereof for four minutes.

One of my favorite moments on the record is the breakdown near the end of “Even In A Cave,” because the band drops its self-important faux-gospel and focuses on the actual music, and the effort shows. In future releases I expect songwriting of this quality and interest, because in my eyes, they can only improve.

Hot Chip
Made in the Dark
Astralwerks/EMI/DFA Records, 2008

By Crow Winters

I’ve been trying to find a single word to summarize the latest Hot Chip release, Made in the Dark. From my first few spins with the album, I had settled with “uneven,” highlighting the albums highest highs and lowest lows. After repeated listenings, I realize now that there’s a much more apt word: “frustrating.” 

There actually is a very good album lurking within this CD’s unnecessary 53-minute running time. Album openers “Out At The Pictures” through “Bendable Poseable” all share a common thread and consistency that have become the group’s signature: creative use of disparate synth sounds, clanking unusual percussion, strong song writing, and a sense of humor and wit simply not present in most of their contemporaries. If this had been a road map for the rest of the album, this could have easily been one of the year’s strongest releases. 

Instead, the band veers off course into a series of cheesy , repetitive, and uninteresting attempts at ballads. “We’re Looking For a Lot of Love,” “Touch Too Much,” and “Made In The Dark” are the throw-aways that their titles hint at and, in the case of the album’s title track, it sounds like they were. It’s not the concept of the ballad that makes these innocuous love-and-breakup dirges fail so badly – ”Wrestlers,” one of the albums standout tracks, is a ballad that both is musically interesting and actually manages to have a sense of humor. The problem with these other ballads is their half-hearted arrangements: any of these tracks could blend into the background of your local soft rock stations. Let’s cut these tracks out and our new running time is 42 minutes. 

The album picks up again with “One Pure Thought,” which, while lacking a bit of the punch of the album’s opener songs, still stands very strongly on it’s own — particularly with it’s very fun stop-start breakdown in the middle. “Hold On” is the album’s true heart: a six-minute Talking Heads-esque opus of funky synth grooves and a provocative prechorus that easily dominates the rest of the song; “I’m only going to heaven if it tastes like caramel” will undoubtedly be the most quotable lyric from this album. 

“Wrestlers” appears next, twisting professional wrestling, sex, and love all into one delicious slow burn. The should-be album closer “Don’t Dance” provides a delightful raveup in it’s second half that shows the “Dance” part of Hot Chip’s dance-rock shtick at it’s finest. In that light, it’s a shame that the last two ballads, “Whistle For Will” and “In The Privacy of Our Love”, exist. It says a lot when the most interesting aspect of these is one of the song’s synth-fart percussions. If you bought the band’s previous release, The Warning, and liked it, then you should probably buy this one too. Just be prepared to either skip a lot of tracks, or make your own (shorter) mix. 

R.E.M.
Accelerate
Warner Bros., 2008

By Crow Winters

The catchphrase for the advertising campaign of R.E.M.’s latest project has been “Return to Form”, but that’s really not entirely fair when you consider a back-catalog as varied and expansive as this trio’s. Which “form” are you referring to, exactly, Mr. Album Sticker?

It’s not really a secret, though — R.E.M. divided their fan base with the incredibly arty and electronic LPs Up and Reveal, both of which point to a bit of naivety on R.E.M.’s part, if they really thought that such a non-radio-friendly direction would sell well, regardless of their (very high, in my opinion) quality. After these, and the disappointingly mid-tempo and predictable Around the Sun, Michael Stipe and company have regrouped to try and inject a new fire into the classic R.E.M. sound.

The new joint, Accelerate, is an unabashed pop album. Many tracks clock in under or around 3 minutes, and sparkle with a familiar ’80s college-radio jangle. Occasionally the pop frame of reference is a little dated (“Horse of Water” sounds suspiciously like a Pearl Jam B-side, and the chiming of “Mr. Richards” like a simplified Billy Corgan rhythm guitar), but R.E.M. hasn’t been this straightforward since 1992’s Automatic for the People.

There are many moments of Accelerate that sound less like a new direction and more like a conscious decision to take something classic and redefine it through their current experiences. Moving between tracks is the same as opening time capsules. Sometimes the content, like “Living Well Is The Best Revenge,” which sits amongst the best material R.E.M. has written in a long time, is a sheer thrill. Other times, like with the streamlined “Hollow Man,” and the Automatic for the People-nostalgic “Until the Day is Done,” it can be embarrassing.

Fortunately, those two tracks are really the only two clunkers on the album. There’s a lot to enjoy for old R.E.M. fans here: “Houston” has the growl and grit of “Swan Swan H,” and “Sing for the Submarine” is a lyrical treat in which old-school fans can find as many references as they want. And there are splashes of forward-thinking surprises; “I’m Gonna DJ,” barely clocking in at 2 minutes, is a white-knuckle rocker that is all too fitting of Stipe’s sarcastic descriptions of apocalyptic excess.

Overall, Accelerate is an energetic, though occasionally splotchy, success. It’s doubtful that it’ll be more then a positive footnote in their repertoire in a few years’ time, but after getting electronic experimentation out of their system, it’s really nice to hear a pop album that has intelligence and songwriting at the forefront, as opposed to the flavor-of-the-moment clichés that have dominated the industry while R.E.M. went on their self-imposed exile.