Califone/ Sonoi

Wide industrial buildings and three- or four-story houses, a grocery store open late on the corner of Ninth Street and what might be Second Avenue, and scattered clusters of people walking along sidewalks left wet by a long day of cold, horizontal rain. Bell House is just around the corner, in a dark sliver of Brooklyn that is neither Williamsburg nor the reassuring grid of the Heights. A little further down lies the vast expanse of Prospect Park; on this quiet Tuesday evening in late March, the varied humanity of Manhattan feels far more distant than the mere half-hour subway ride that actually separates it from here.

Past the Black bouncer scribbling pen crosses on the backs of the hands of kids who haven't yet turned twenty-one ("one sip of beer and you're out, and so are your friends"), past the little ticket booth, the venue opens up and takes your breath away, with a high ceiling made of wooden beams and giant glass chandeliers hanging over a small, attentive, orderly crowd, almost everyone with a beer in hand and their eyes fixed on the stage. It's very early, maybe not even nine o'clock yet, but Sonoi are already playing: three young guys with the faces of nice boys, wringing out a full, moon-lit sound; it takes barely half a minute before, in place of the great bison effigy hanging above their heads, what appears—at least in some people's minds—is a "Made in Chicago" trademark. And indeed, the trio is Chicagoan to the bone, and their sonic carpet of long, rarefied electric ballads is about the best possible way to prepare for the evening's stars, Tim Rutili's Califone. Truth be told, Sonoi seem moored closer to latter-day Wilco than to Califone, which becomes clear especially in the two or three up-tempo numbers they allow themselves before ceding the stage. Good for them, and the songs are good too. Not quite up to par, at least tonight, is Adam Busch's raspy voice, which, with his checked flannel shirt and glasses perched on his nose, makes him look like he stepped straight out of a Weezer video.

Then it's their turn. These four guys pushing fifty who last year put out one of the best albums of their career. More than that. Maybe "All My Friends Are Funeral Singers" deserves to be counted among the five best American records of 2009, alongside work by Wilco, Elvis Perkins and a few others. Rankings aside, one thing is certain: Califone are living through a particular state of grace, and tonight they're ready to prove it on stage too. When they make their entrance, the Bell House is packed, four or five hundred people, more men than women, in their thirties and forties, the young white New York intelligentsia at its finest. There isn't a single black person in sight, save for the bouncer, a couple of Hispanic faces, as many Asian ones, and that can't be a coincidence — even in dazzling, cosmopolitan New York, big America still lives by tribes, at least when it comes to music.

The show starts off quiet, the mood is intimate, and Rutili, sitting between guitar and keyboards as usual, is clearly in the mood to joke around with the crowd. But it quickly builds in intensity. For the first few songs Jim Becker, the only one standing, picks up the banjo, and with his long grey beard he looks like some epic outlaw of the Wild West, while behind him Joe Adamik and Ben Massarella split the percussion duties between them. Adamik's setup is something less than an ordinary drum kit, while Massarella's playground is overflowing and steals a piece or two from it here and there — a cymbal, a tom.

Right away come all the ballads from the band's latest effort: here's "Evidence", here's the simple, enchanting "Funeral Singers", here's the powerful "Buñuel", and here's the aching "Krill". Meanwhile Becker has switched to electric guitar and the sound has filled out, while the two at the back are playing a show all their own, a fantastic web of interplay, a continuous, perfect meshing of parts. Massarella keeps pushing his reading glasses up and down, his long silver-streaked hair swept over to one side of his chest, the freewheeling uncle from Indiana who beats the hell out of skins and assorted objects but never misses Christmas dinner. Tomorrow we're playing at the Ifc Center, Rutili reminds everyone, it'll be us plus the film. Yes, because alongside the album, in 2009 Califone also made a documentary film, and on this spring tour they occasionally bring it along and have fun scoring it live. "How many of you are coming tomorrow too?" he asks, and a few dozen hands go up, prompting a pleased "Wow!" from him.

Then more songs from "All My Friends Are Funeral Singers" run through the set, along with a few detours into the 2006 gem "Roots & Crowns" and a little further back still. After a breathless hour-plus and a break of just a few minutes, there's room for an encore in which Califone show their most decidedly deconstructed, post-rock side, nearly half an hour of collective hypnosis at the end of which the crowd wakes up joyful and grateful. Outside, the Brooklyn night seems less cold. Manhattan doesn't feel so far away after all.

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