"I give no credence to the lines that divide styles of music," Chick Corea said after his concert in Spaulding Auditorium last term. The jazz fusion legend might find some kindred spirits in Calexico.
On their latest release, "Feast of Wire," the Tucson, Ariz.-based group takes ingredients including rock, folk, Latin, country, electronica, jazz and classical music, puts them in a pot, melts them all together and creates a wonderfully haunting witches' brew of an album.
Calexico is led by the musical jack-of-all-trades Joey Burns, who puts his Berklee School of Music training to good use here. He plays everything from guitar to cello, vibraphone, pump organ and even orchestra bells. In addition, he wrote or co-wrote all 16 songs and their string arrangements.
But "Feast of Wire" is far from a solo effort. Drummer and percussionist John Convertino shares the writing credit on many songs, and multi-instrumentalists Nick Luca and Craig Schumacher add key elements to every cut on the album.
The experience of listening to this CD all the way through is not unlike watching a David Lynch movie. One is never really sure what it's about, but it is dark, mysterious, at some points exhilarating and at other points hypnotic -- and always astounding in its complexity and depth.
The album really pushes boundaries with combinations of instruments that aren't often heard together. While this kind of experimentation can sometimes bore listeners if the songs meander and lose focus, these grab you from the start, build on their original themes, keep you interested and end soon enough that they leave you wanting more.
Calexico's songcraft is immediately apparent on the second track, "Quattro (World Drifts In)." It starts with an acoustic guitar and a wah-wah electric guitar trading licks. Soon, Paul Niehaus' distant pedal steel guitar drifts into the mix, and after the first verse a staccato mariachi horn section comes out of nowhere. The result is a haunting amalgam of musical styles that is downright enthralling.
Equally good is the Southwestern-tinged instrumental "Close Behind." Sounding right out of a Clint Eastwood spaghetti Western, it even has a somewhat cinematic, three-act structure. The song starts out with a swift Latin beat, with Niehaus' pedal steel providing an eerie dream-like melody, but the listener is soon woken up by a quick, hard-hitting salvo from the horn section. The second act begins when Eddie Lopez's accordion builds on the original melody until it is interrupted again by the forceful horns. The final and most dramatic act features a swelling string section building on the accordion's melody, which is then decisively brought to a close by the horns. And all of this happens in less than three minutes.
But the album's real crown jewel is "Black Heart." It begins with a creepy, slinky melody written for the string section, which is soon joined by an equally slinky drumbeat from Convertino. Burns then steps up to the mic, nearly whispering lyrics like "Can't find the poison/Now I got no cure/Fangs are stuck inside my skin." The tension continues to build as Burns notes that "one man's ghost perceives another man's last chance." Then things get quiet, too quiet, as Burns sings about "apparitions worth their weight in gold" and is accompanied only by drums and static. The song quickly builds again with the return of the string section like the ghost that just won't go away. Everything builds to a climax as the strings grow more dissonant and Convertino hammers away on the snare drum. And then it all just dissipates into nothing, the song vanishing as mysteriously as it arrived.
The only criticism I have of the album is that Burns' voice isn't at the same level as the rest of the album's components. There are some good songs on "Feast of Wire" that could have been excellent had Calexico enlisted a vocalist that could sing with a little more power and inflection than Burns. But that's a little like saying "Blonde on Blonde" would have been a better album had Bob Dylan handed over the singing duties to someone else.
In a lot of ways, this album builds on what Wilco started last year with "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot." Like "Foxtrot," "Feast of Wire" has a similar country-rock base and experiments with electronics, but Calexico goes one step further by throwing in a few more musical styles and a few more instruments, and darkens the blend a shade or two. The result is an entrancing 48 minutes of music that you'll sink into like the desert sand from which it sprung.
