Califone - Shards of Memory

Where do Red Red Meat come from? Can they be likened to anything other than a mess — of meat first of all, but also of classified ads, neon signs, dripping soft drinks, filthy bars, and the whole lazy, sun-scorched, devastated and smirking imagery of America's underbelly?

The name comes from a truck-cleaning company, but it could just as easily be the enigmatic marker-pen graffiti on a gas-station bathroom in the middle of Arizona, where, if the moon is right, you can get into hell's most exclusive VIP room.

Tim Rutili's band was born on the outskirts of Chicago, in Addison, IL, not out of the angry idleness of a few kids but from a meeting between film students and musicians — proof of just how much impulsiveness and intellectual construction blur together in Red Red Meat's music: Tim and Glynis Johnson, who played bass at the time. Ben Massarella would later join on drums.

Red Red Meat would take shape in the hands of Brian Deck, who later became a member of the band himself.

A narcotic stench wafts from the muddy guitars of this sweltering debut: "Sister Flossy" sways between humid torpor and sudden thunderous outbursts, 70s blues-rock clichés vomited right on the doorstep that suddenly turn into the distant sound of scrap metal before returning as towering simulacra, mute and obtuse deities.

Granted, Red Red Meat is the band's least experimental, most unripe record, as shown by the opening blues-punk of "Robo Sleep," a predictable motorized nightmare, or the larval grunge-blues mantra of "Cellophane Man," or more generic furious ravings like the Stones-esque "Grief Giver" and "Snowball".

But pretty much all of 90s music, post-Sonic Youth, and the ramshackle saga of Red Red Meat take shape in this debut, which not coincidentally lets the band hook up with Chicago's emerging scene (Smashing Pumpkins above all), who they'd tour with, reaping benefits still hard to pin down, if not for the deal with Sub Pop.

Jimmywine Majestic is the first product of this collaboration, and things already seem changed from the opening "Flank," which comes across as normalized thanks to the cleaner production and slower tempos — though these actually throw into relief the song's schizoid, degenerate shape, the chaotic arbitrariness of its melody, the brutal, bestial force of the guitars. And, above all, its prophetic, shamanic, ultimately nonchalant venture into the half-explored territories of American gothic.

Frozen in your headlights, glowing red

(“Stained And Lit”)

Distant glimmers frame landscapes ravaged by the elements, skeletons of prefab buildings swaying grotesquely: but it's only in the gap-toothed acoustics of "Braindead" that you can glimpse what Red Red Meat's music would later become. On Jimmywine Majestic the deconstruction of the songs is still at the stage where the composition just seems a bit odd, and the instrumental interludes are pauses for reflection in which the band merely hints at things, so that everything ends up feeling like the backdrop to something that never quite arrives (the long digression of "Moon Calf Tripe").

“Wings on fire, the stars are out”

I mean, I thought we were making a classic rock record.

Tim Rutili

That's exactly how it was, even though Bunny Gets Paid is the record where Red Red Meat's personality and ease with musical construction and execution are fully realized. Lysergic visions like the famous "carpet of horses" glimpsed from an airplane window ("Carpet Of Horses"), unexpected, hermetic elegies (the classic "Gauze") make up the fragmentary pantheon of images cradled by the band's intuitions: the brawling rasp — complete with broken bottles — of "Rosewood, Wax, Voltz+Glitter," which pulls itself back together into a deranged, bleeding post-grunge dance.

Or else the limping, skeletal beauty of “Buttered”, which veiledly confesses the pain of Glynis's death from AIDS, when she had already left the band for the Gore Gore Girls and her relationship with Tim had long been over: “Falling sickness faked, unkind/Drawn to your sore lip, shallow/Holy water's low tide/Another fixture waiting”. Pretty much the whole mood of the record flaunts a dazed bitterness, which fades into the funereal inertia of “Sad Cadillac”, or into the already-drunk choral toast of “There's Always Tomorrow”.

Rutili watches, inspects the pain of the living with the detachment of a biologist, or rather of a prophet, a fallen angel, ready like all the best artists to shoulder a good part of the burden himself. “I remember loving that record, being really proud of it, and then, when we started playing shows behind it, I remember someone coming up to the stage and leaving a note at my feet that said: 'Quit it with the heroin and play some rock.'”

Gothic-blues anthems like “Chain Chain Chain” or the psychotic flailing of “Idiot Son” won't be enough to set the crowd straight: Red Red Meat are too ambiguous for a scene where drama is tangible on every corner, at times impossible to tell apart from musical expression tout court, and where the audience seems to crave it, famished, wanting every show to be a bestial outburst of violent noise.

Bunny Gets Paid soon vanishes from distribution, only to receive, in 2009, the predictable posthumous canonization courtesy of Sub Pop, complete with the obligatory outtakes (worth noting is the cover of “Words” by Low) and testimonials of admiration (Isaac Brock and Joe Pernice, though they should have asked Jeff Tweedy and DEE too).

But the die is now cast, and There's A Star Above The Manger Tonight too will be a widely foreseen commercial dud. No great loss, because this last Red Red Meat album, while lacking the previous one's under-skin tremor, represents a clear consolidation of the band's command over its own music. Tim calls it their best album, and it's easy to see why.

Pushed even further toward the noise/acoustic experimentation that would become a cornerstone of the subsequent Califone career, this fourth album from the group features faint banjo strumming (the heart-wrenching “Second Hand At Sea”) but also full-on formless sabbaths, hushed like “Paul Pachal”, and murky, babbling distortion (the eternal “Like Eggs On Stilts”).

There's A Star Above The Manger Tonight is, in short, incomparably more indigestible and uncompromising than Bunny Gets Paid, at times truly deranged and ossified, to the point where the melody dissolves into a thin percussive pulse (“All Tied”). After the opening “Sulfur” and the title track, through to “Chinese Balls” (closer, almost, to the band's maudit blues-rock beginnings) and “Second Hand Sea” — natural continuations of the previous album's tales from the dark desert of the American hinterland — the music of Red Red Meat frays apart, as in some monstrous mutation in which Tim seems to progressively lose his ordinary linguistic and musical faculties, only to relearn them distorted and detached from their own semantic form. Stomping borborygmi (“Bury Me”) and autistic masses (“Airstream Driver”) depict a torn reality over which physics and logic hold no more power, but which attempts to reassemble itself on the emotional substrate and image-driven memories of “Quarter Horses”.

And it is in this chaos of broken instruments, howls, in this noise of shattered reality that unfolds across There's A Star Above The Manger Tonight — and on the tour that follows — that the Red Red Meat project slowly founders, naturally dissolving after yet another disappointment. But it won't take long before it's reborn as something new.

"Mean little seed"

Holograms of a contemporary past, relics of a remote future. Spirits of the earth feeding on astral dust. In Tim Rutili's new incarnation, folk and blues take on the features of ancestral masks, brought back on stage through a process of deconstruction and reassembly: a matter of wind and silicon, strings and laptop, Dock Boggs and Phil Elvrum.

Having left the Red Red Meat experience behind, Rutili starts afresh from the most personal side of his musical calling: “The idea was to create little pop songs made of pieces picked up here and there; it all slowly grew out of what was meant to be just a small home project.” Thus, between 1998 and 2000, two EPs are born, both simply titled after the name of his new artistic creation: Califone. The reference says it all: “Califone is the name of a company that made very sturdy, efficient portable record players for schools. We had one with us while recording and we ran everything through it: vocals, drums, effects… literally everything!”

At first Califone is basically just Rutili and his computer, but a group of old collaborators soon joins him, including Ben Massarella, Tim Hurley and Brian Deck. On the debut EPs (collected in 2002 into a single volume titled Sometimes Good Weather Follows Bad People), the sound of Rutili's “portable record player” comes across as a kind of lo-fi version of late-period Red Red Meat: starting with the opening “On The Steeple With The Shakes (Xmas Tigers)”, Rutili's slurred voice traces out a crooked Lou Barlow-style songwriting, in which the acoustic scaffolding of tracks like “Silvermine Pictures” gets smeared with Beck-like detours. While the second EP more explicitly reveals its Appalachian leanings (from “St. Martha Let It Fold” to “Don't Let Me Die Nervous”), a central role in both records falls to the rhythms, which on “To Hush A Sick Transmission” echo like nightmares spawned from the mind of Tom Waits.

After a long gestation, in 2001 the time comes for Califone's full-length debut, with the album Roomsound. “It's my record more than any other,” Rutili confesses. “I'd just gotten divorced, I was living alone for the first time in my life and I'd stopped drinking. Finishing this record was like a kind of therapy.” The band's trademark sound is immediately recognizable within the folds of “Trout Silk”, with a shimmer of acoustic strings that refracts into post-modern blues. But right after, the choruses of “Bottles And Bones (Shade And Sympathy)” suggest new melodic openings, marking a shift from Califone's earliest steps. Between the skeletal roughness, Will Oldham-style, of “Fisherman's Wife” and the echoes of Red Red Meat found in the sharper contours of “Slow Right Hand”, the Roomsound formula doesn't yet achieve full cohesion, but it does showcase the full richness of its ideas (the long closing coda of “New Black Tooth” is emblematic in this sense).

The following year, Rutili ventures alongside Califone into exploring another of his musical passions: film soundtracks. “We'd done an improvised-music show where we imagined a live accompaniment to Ladislas Starevich's film 'The Mascot'. We loved the result so much that we decided to shape it into an album.” Thus Deceleration One is born, a tribute to Califone's more abstraction-leaning side, soon followed by a second volume (Deceleration Two), this time inspired by films by Brent Green and Jeff Economy, as well as Charles Bryant's 1920s “Salomé”. “Working with images is something completely instinctive,” Rutili reflects. “To me, the music and even the lyrics of songs are already very visual to begin with, so soundtracks are a natural outlet.”

But it's with Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, in 2003, that Califone push themselves to dig into the very deepest roots woven through American history, grinding them down into a myriad of sharp splinters and reassembling them according to their own peculiar sensibility: “Tradition and experimentation constantly feed off each other,” Rutili observes, “and that friction creates new energy.”

So, no stereotypical attempt at revival, but rather a passionate desire to reclaim one's own baggage of memory. "It's not a matter of imitation, but of rediscovering within yourself a music that is inevitably part of your DNA, a music that sounds as if it had always existed, through the acceptance of your own origins and their transcendence, without losing their familiarity and beauty."

Thus, the introduction of a liquid carpet of Radiohead-esque pulsations quickly gives way to the piano notes of "Horoscopic. Amputation. Honey", whose soft melody ends up shattering into a noisy finale worthy of certain digressions by Jim O'Rourke. The acoustic arpeggios of "Michigan Girls" fragment amid Ben Massarella's percussion, which in turn deconstruct themselves in the brief instrumental interlude "Cat Eats Coyote".

It's the constant, carefully sought balance between the form of tradition and the spirit of the avant-garde that makes every sonic fragment of Califone's music on Quicksand/Cradlesnakes so captivating. If guitars and classic-style structures make up the album's essential fabric, the non-linear construction of the songs continually evades predictability, reinventing the past with the freshness of a creativity that's never an end in itself. Within the folds of the record there isn't just the dirty electric blues of "Your Golden Ass" or the country scent of "Mean Little Seed" and "Million Dollar Funeral" (a nemesis of Gram Parsons's "$1000 Wedding"?), but within a few moments one moves from the spectral, obsessive rhythm of "(Red)" to the breezy pop song "Vampiring Again".

As in the bizarre cartoon included as a video track on the CD, what emerges from the notes of Quicksand/Cradlesnakes is a modern imagery populated by the echoes of ancestral tales of ghosts and sinners, of which nothing remains but the memory of a few broken, seemingly senseless phrases, trapped on the border between desert and skyscrapers. A border where yesterday's reflection and tomorrow's shadow merge along the horizon line.

“Sharpening the edges of your grace”

A faceless creature, half man and half bird: this is the nightmare that haunts Tim Rutili's nights, the Heron King risen from the depths of Celtic legend. A prophetic vision, or just the shadow of a deception?

Legend has it that the Britons were defeated by the Romans precisely through the ploy of a fake Heron King, a terrifying deity whose image the conquerors knew how to exploit to strike fear into their enemies: thus, the creature that dwells deep within our fears may turn out to be nothing more than a disguise made of a pair of stilts and a few rags, like the figure wandering through the unreal landscapes on the cover of Heron King Blues.

Our nightmares can be used against us. Or we can choose to use them to express ourselves. With Heron King Blues, Califone choose the second path, letting the reflections of Rutili's unconscious guide their improvisations. The result is an album with a nocturnal, dark allure, though less convincing than its predecessor, one in which the notes at times seem to scatter into an unresolved fragmentation.

The opening "Wingbone", with its jagged acoustic guitar and unexpectedly soft melody, seems to flow directly out of Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, as if it were an outtake performed by a sedated Robert Johnson. But already with "Trick Bird" the mood grows darker and slower, making room for Rutili's listless voice and Massarella's percussive fragmentations. And after an increasingly jarring build-up, "Sawtooth Sung A Cheater's Song" arrives to draw even more attention to detail: streaks of organ, wurlitzer and cello mottle the many-faceted surface of a track whose slowness makes the words feel like the breath of the soul, before giving way to a percussion coda that turns into a rarefied, shapeshifting sabbath.

Over the pulsations of the magnetic, throbbing loops of "Apple", the voice is reduced to a circular mantra, while the guitar suddenly opens escape routes within the eternal return of its own stripped-down theme. Then, in "Lion & Bee", only piano and guitar remain for a ballad that could belong to Red House Painters, were it not for a vaguely menacing undercurrent of electronic interference making its way through.

The true stature of Heron King Blues, however, lies in the two tracks that close the album, before the "Outro" that serves as an instrumental farewell: one simply can't help being caught off guard by the surprise of "2 Sisters Drunk On Each Other", with its funky guitars dancing over warm loops ready to blossom into lush horn corollas, before souring into an apocalyptic soul.

And before the astonishment fades, there's still room for the nearly 15 minutes of the title track, which starts out as a blues with Waits-like grime, its voice filtered until it becomes an alien echo, letting the guitar's oblique phrasing vent over the drums' urgent accents. Then everything seems to liquefy and lose itself in its own spirals, until it evaporates into the reflection of that indifferent voice, which resurfaces accompanied by a violin that smells of forgotten times.

Thus, sailing on an ever sharper breath of spatial jazz, we arrive at the chaotic finale, with a veil of regret for that discontinuity which keeps the Heron King from fulfilling all his promises.

"Dream for me dreamless"

Reclaiming the tradition inherited as a legacy, without settling for a stale reproduction of the past: this has always been Califone's challenge since the very start of their career. In 2006, this vocation becomes the central theme of Roots & Crowns: "Joining what you come from — your roots — with what you strive to reach — the crown."

The inspiration stems from the pages of a novel by Canadian writer Robertson Davies, "The Rebel Angels", an ironic tale of murderous impulses within the academic microcosm, in which one of the protagonist's scholarly ambitions must come to terms with her gypsy roots: "the new songs are precisely about this: where you come from, where you are, where you're going", Rutili explains.

It's hardly surprising, then, that the most representative track on Roots & Crowns is actually a cover: Califone pay tribute to the influences behind their music with a dreamlike rendition of "The Orchids" by Psychic Tv, a song Rutili says he listened to on endless repeat while making the album, finding within the folds of that soft melody the spark to start writing songs again.

Songs born from melodies hummed behind the wheel and captured on a cell phone recorder, suggested by conversations overheard by chance, built on disorderly collections of loops and field recordings, charged with heartbeats and rustlings found within the walls of the studio: "We took our time shaping and manipulating a more experimental sound collage and translating it into solid melodies and more concise song structures," Rutili recounts.

Ben Massarella's rhythmic tribalism ushers in the simmering opening of "Pink And Sour," piercing a blues skeleton with electric shards as swift as stray bullets. But the tone immediately and unexpectedly relaxes with "Spider's House," one of the lightest and airiest compositions Califone have ever made, featuring the precious contribution of a horn section borrowed from friends Bitter Tears, and a piano sharpened by tape and paperclips applied to its strings.

Amid the lean, vibrating shadows of the acoustic guitars that guide the mosaics of tracks like "Sunday Noises" and "Our Kitten Sees Ghosts," what stands out are the clangs and distortions of the cutting "A Chinese Actor," alongside the detours and shifting rhythms of "Black Metal Valentine," a relentless parade of plastic drumming and synthetic hisses. Percussive inventions and jagged guitars, together with Rutili's hazy murmur wrapped in ghostly choral accompaniment, form the connective tissue of Roots & Crowns, which Califone steep in a constant haze of indecipherable interference.

The atavistic dance of a folk violin accompanies the brief instrumental interlude of "Alice Crawley," making way for the otherworldly voice and zombie hand-claps of "Rose Petal Ear." But it's with "3 Legged Animals," a new version of a track originally written by Rutili for the thriller-horror film "The Lost," that the formal balance achieved by Roots & Crowns truly reaches a completeness worthy of Wilco, sketching out a desire for rebirth that seems to spring from the traces of "A Ghost Is Born": “Leave your memories, we’re almost new/ sleep for me sleepless/ dream for me dreamless”.

“All my friends are half-gone birds”

After years of work and at least two key records such as Quicksand/Cradlesnakes and Roots & Crowns, it's all too easy to fall into the trap of taking Califone's deconstructionist genius for granted: an almost unparalleled ability to dismantle the mosaic of American tradition and reassemble it from new perspectives, without ever giving in to mere cerebral posturing.

Yet on All My Friends Are Funeral Singers (which in 2009 marked the band's move to Dead Oceans), Rutili and co.'s usual skill at mixing and matching the pieces of the puzzle doesn't always translate into an equally brilliant sensibility when it comes to reconstructing the overall picture: it's a matter of nuance, in a record that nonetheless continues to dissect the archetypes of the notorious song-form with passion and inventiveness, albeit with results just slightly less sharply focused than its immediate predecessor.

Floating distortions, magmatic repetitions, sudden bursts of interference serving a beat more plastic than ever: the opening "Giving Away The Bride" seems designed to throw listeners off balance. The rest of the record, however, follows coordinates more familiar to Califone's trajectory. In the wake of Roots & Crowns, the band stays true to its intent of importing popular ingredients into its own folk centrifuge: new melodic openings take shape amid the dry guitars and feedback of "Polish Girls," while "Krill" seems to be calling an imaginary summit between Will Oldham and Jason Lytle.

The direct stride of "Funeral Singers" bears the unmistakable stamp of the American band's classics: after all, Rutili's pensive murmurs, Ben Massarella's percussion and Brian Deck's production are the constant traits of an instantly recognizable personality and consistency. At the heart of the record there's always the folk dimension in all its many facets, from the circular arpeggios of "1928" to the razor-edged blues of "Salt," passing through the rustic (post-bluegrass?) dance of an "Ape-like" swirling with banjo, organ and feedback. Every track seems suspended in a haze of sounds and rhythms, scraps of electricity and acoustic stock smudged with digital intrusions: yet there's always a thin thread keeping it anchored to the ground, with an attention to detail of surprising richness.

All My Friends Are Funeral Singers began life as a film project, intended as the soundtrack to Rutili's first, eponymous feature film, presented at the 2010 Sundance Festival. A vocation for the relationship between music and image that's certainly nothing new for Califone, and one attested here by the three brief instrumentals included on the record and by a "Buñuel" that pays tribute to the Spanish director ("Every camera loves you better/ When you quit trying to play"), alternating a fiddle dance with a sharp rock spirit worthy of the Red Red Meat days.

Images and visions, after all, are the substance of Califone's music, and dreams have always been Rutili's best friends: “All my friends are weeds and rain/ All my friends are half-gone birds, are magnets/ All my friends are words”, he whispers in "Funeral Singers." Trees growing from graves, sinking their roots into our very bones; opium eaters and the rubble of civil wars; dark-hued kaleidoscopes populated by animals, exorcists and brides. Ancient and postmodern apparitions, inextricably intertwined.

“Watching the new world die”

Moments. Fragments. Sometimes life seems made up of brief instants following one another without interruption. What matters is the thread that holds the pages together, the plot able to bring everything back into unity: stitching, mending, sutures. Stitches, the title Tim Rutili chose in 2013 for Califone's return after a four-year hiatus, refers to exactly this: to the bonds that hold the pieces together, to the stitches that close wounds. To whatever can instill in a handful of individual songs a sense of belonging to a shared vision.

Stitches has a multifaceted soul. "We treated each song as its own planet," says Rutili. "I wanted this to be a more schizophrenic record, able to bring together conflicting textures and emotions." Hence the decision to move away from Chicago and let the recordings unfold without a single center of gravity, both geographically and in terms of personnel. California, Arizona, Texas. At the controls, respectively: Griffin Rodriguez, Michael Krassner and Craig Ross. "Involving different people and recording in different places helped give the whole thing a certain tension."

The outcome marks a further step by the band toward more classic song architecture: this is immediately evident in the bare acoustic opening of "Movie Music Kills A Kiss," its linear development only lightly flecked by intruding keyboard punctuation. The Wilco-esque rock accents become more pronounced than ever on the emphatic drumming of "Frosted Tips," while the title track wraps itself, hazy, around a lightly stepping beat.

It is, however, the desert horizons of "moonbath.brainsalt.a.holy.fool" that most emblematically sketch out the landscapes of Stitches, evoking the frontier visions of Howe Gelb in its dusty unspooling, amid echoes of harmonica and pedal steel.

The wind carries with it stories that come from afar, woven with biblical allusions. The pianistic flow of "Magdalene" is joined by horns and choirs in a kind of agnostic country-gospel, while the journey toward the promised land unfolds through the cinematic strings of "Moses". Unique individuals and universal archetypes, their faces dissolving amid the liquid sounds of the closing "Turtle Eggs / An Optimist".

And yet, in its progression from the multiform to the one, Stitches seems to stop short of completion: Califone's gradual drift toward more settled forms only partly conveys the band's true personality. Intentions aside, there remains in Rutili an almost bashful reluctance to reveal himself too openly, leaving the songs on Stitches suspended between concreteness and abstraction.

The story of Califone yet to come is a thread still to be woven.

“Maybe everyone involved in this project is an abstract painter”

So, let's start from this statement. Note well: abstract here means non-figurative, not anti-figurative. A destructuring representation isn't enough to negate the form of the subject posing in front of the easel. Doubts that the American musical tradition is as concrete as a barrel of bourbon, and that Califone are abstract painters? Good, let's proceed.

Let's fix two reference points: the beginning and the end, meaning the title and the final track (and first single) of the album. One observation is unavoidable: you have to be able to afford putting a track like "Snow Angel" at the bottom of the running order, let alone spoiling it shortly before with a sly unplugged version. How damn beautiful is that song? A craftier and less gifted songwriter would have dropped it right at the start without hesitation, but Tim Rutili is too gifted to play it smart. What do this "snow angel" and the echo reverberating from the title have in common? The former is a pencil that erases its own mark, destined nonetheless to dissolve under the sun's eraser; the latter is an acoustic phenomenon that, bouncing off one or more surfaces, degrades until it vanishes, as Arthur Russell taught us first, and William Basinski after him. 

Faded figures that leave no lasting trace but, in the instant they appear, can take your breath away. If you think about it, that's more or less the whole Califone doctrine: fragments of previous lives, stumps of statues once alive, gnats smeared on the windshield of a speeding car. The last wisps of smoke rising from the ruins of an empire, clinging to the present like paint on a canvas: from this point of view, the music of Rutili & co. is at once a lyrical and a resistant act, a trench diary of which Echo Mine is a new, hermetic page.

The difference, this time, is the geometric rigor of the staging, arranged like a jazz fugue: the proper songs are the slices of bread at either end, the experiments the filling in between. The opening already says everything about the mood awaiting us, because it doesn't take a psychic to understand that "Romans" should be read as "romance", and, in case of any lingering doubt, the chorus's invitation sweeps it away: "Kill the algorithm". On the crossing of the desert that leads to the snow angel (even knowing that, by the time we arrive, it will have already melted!) we'll find the usual game in their bag, and much more: slashes of slide guitar, Neil Young-style saturation, pickled krautrock, oscillators, filters, noise. Alchemical monstrosities, displayed in a museum or mixed in test tubes in some clandestine basement.

Then there's Robyn Mineko Williams's ballet, for which these ten sketches serve as the soundtrack, but I don't want to see it: I'd rather imagine those dance steps, maybe even miming them myself. They themselves suggest as much, after all: "When you're feeling down and you feel yourself slipping/ You have to access that inner actress in you".

The point isn't that Echo Mine represents some kind of giant leap forward in a career now spanning over two decades: the point is that it's yet another unclassifiable record from a band as precious as the waters of Lake Michigan. Not bad, for a patched-up Frankenstein. But maybe we've flown too far afield, so let's come back down to earth with a couple of third-rate-critic rhetorical questions: is it better to move people or to experiment? "Tradition" or "innovation"? Better to just be Tim Rutili, always and in any case. Try it, if you can.

Confirmation of their rediscovered inspiration comes three years later with Villagers, nine tracks that reaffirm a songwriting solidity and variety that doesn't disown past flirtations with musique concrète, folding them into the album's seemingly poppiest track, a melodic turn that in craftier hands could have aimed for far greater glory ("The Habsburg Jaw"), or stirring them into the seven minutes of "Mcmansions", a deeply visceral emotional trip recounting the ordeal of a drug addict.

In confronting the decline of the old America, Califone narrate the arrival of old age through the fragile icon of youthfulness in the mournful goth-ballad "Halloween", nod to Burt Bacharach in the soft-jazz-pop scratch of "Ox-eye" and in the yielding bossa-nova-like "Sweetly".

With Villagers, Califone reclaim, without any further hesitation, a place of prominence on the American alt-rock scene with a set of cleverly bittersweet songs ("Eyelash"), tracks rich with echoes of the past and fleeting glimpses of the future, painting a reality made of feelings, reflections and chaos.

Contributions by Ossydiana Speri ("Echo Mine"), Gianfranco Marmoro ("Villagers")

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