Calexico leave their home in Tucson Arizona
AFTER 20-plus years and nine albums Arizona rock band Calexico is still defying those who want to pigeonhole them.
Wentworth Courier
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JOEY Burns and John Convertino have been around with their Arizona-bred rock band Calexico for more than 20 years and their newest album, The Thread That Keeps Us — their ninth — shows they are still determined to defy those anal retentive listeners who are determined to pigeonhole them.
Depending where you look you’ll get anything between five (Allmusic) and seven musical styles, but most of them agree on Americana and alternative/ indie rock, with post-rock, pop rock and country thrown into the mix.
Whatever the genre, Burns and Convertino write consistently good songs with catchy melodies and intelligent lyrics and this latest offering, with its generous 15 tracks, is an entertaining 45 minutes which reflects on these unsettling times but without pushing an agenda.
As Burns says: “Instead of writing straight-up protest songs, I want to tell stories.”
The songs also reflect the fact that they made the album 1000 miles away from their home town of Tucson in a studio on the North Californian coast.
ORGANIC
The album is intercut with a few short instrumental tracks of the band having a jam. These act as little circuit breakers between the longer tracks with their diverse moods and styles — all very individual but nevertheless evoking the sounds of other bands like Crowded House (Bridge to Nowhere and Thrown to the Wild) or Los Lobos (Another Space) and even Bad Seeds (Dead in the Water) with its tubular bell reminiscent of Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand.
The band also sounds a lot less produced than on previous outings, settling on an organic, harder-edged approach with plenty of immediacy when needed.
A simple love song brings the album to an affirmative end after all the doubts and uncertainties of most of the material
As the album’s title suggests, there is a thread running through it. Take for instance Another Space, with its insistent rat-tat-tat refrain “In another time in another space, in another way we’ll get back to this place” featuring wailing trumpets over an urgent rhythm section led by Convertino’s excellent drumming.
This leads into Unconditional Waltz, a short Mexican-inflected instrumental with trumpets harmonising over an acoustic guitar. The title of that track in turn turns up in the closer, Music Box, a simple love song: “I’ve travelled across the sea just to bring you this/An unconditional waltz”, bringing the album to a positive affirmative end after all the doubts and uncertainties of most of the material.
Dead In The Water, for instance, deals with violence, corruption and arrogance among the cops while in the Girl In The Forest the hero journeys away from the city to ease his troubled mind: “Something’s got to change before everything’s gonna disappear right before our eyes”.
This feeling of unease is also present in one of the strongest tracks Eyes Wide Awake and especially in Under the Wheels, the most explicitly dystopian of all the songs where we are living — and often with eyes wide shut — “under the wheels of the war machine”.
But there are plenty of lighter moments with Flores y Tamales bubbling with a Tex-Mex Buena Vista carnival buzz and the retro pop feel of The Town and Miss Lorraine.
Something for everyone, then, and plenty of material there to work its way into your inner ear space.
You can get The Thread That Keeps Us at JB Hi-Fi for $19.99.