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Calexico Uncovers Carried to DustTucson Band Taps Southwest for New Musical Directions
Calexico's latest album showcases elegant restraint and a nod to the region the band calls home.
On its first album since 2006’s Garden Ruin, Tucson-based Calexico has crafted a song cycle imbued in the endless horizons and stark vastness of the Southwest. Carried to Dust is a gem from start to finish, with each of its 15 tracks like chapters in a dusty, sun-bleached travelogue. With principals Joey Burns (vocals, guitar) and John Convertino (drums) at the helm, Calexico has always colored its folk songs liberally with the sounds of Latin America, employing horns, Spanish guitars, mariachis and lyrics en Español. The band takes the recipe to ecstatic new heights, painting its songs with all the vistas and breadth of a desert highway. Carried to Dust a Hometown TributeBurns and Convertino have called Carried to Dust a tribute to its hometown. Anyone who has lived in the Southwest will probably understand. Those who have not will find it the perfect musical companion to that road trip that’s been simmering on the to-do list. Beneath these delicate acoustic-based songs is a quiet menace that threatens to boil over but remains expertly reined in by one of the finest working bands in America today. The Latin folk rock that first brought Calexico to prominence is alive and well on the album’s first track, “Victor Jara’s Hands.” It immediately recalls an older Calexico song—“Quattro (World Drifts In),” from its 2003 masterwork, Feast of Wire. Propelled by percussion and the out-front strumming of Burns’ acoustic guitar, the song pays tribute to Jara (a Chilean poet and activist) by employing English and Spanish lyrics (sung beautifully here by Spanish artist Jairo Zavala). “Two Silver Trees” is a noirish number riddled with glockenspiel, Chinese guizeng, Venezuelan cuatro, and omnichord. “There are code breakers with lines well tapped / Traces sweeping out across the static night / You are draped in white like the blossoms of the tree,” Burns sings against the quirky instrumental mélange. The effect is at once spooky and melodic. Dynamics, Contributors Fuel Calexico’s WorkOver its career Calexico has relied on dynamics—the push and pull between loud and soft. It is used to stunning effect on “House of Valparaiso” and “Slowness,” the former sung with Iron and Wine’s Sam Beam and the latter a dusty duet with Iowa songbird Pieta Brown. As they have throughout their career, Burns and Convertino have called on friends and musical compatriots to decorate their records. Here, Beam’s husky rasp is used sparingly, while Brown’s voice transforms “Slowness” from the proverbial coal into a diamond. Accented by Paul Niehaus’ tasteful pedal steel playing, the track finds Burns and Brown reminiscing a night under the stars and how “their slowness took us by surprise.” Like its predecessors, Carried to Dust contains a number of instrumentals that run the gamut from 40-second interludes to full-on Southwestern rock jams. Convertino’s expressive drumming style has never sounded better—he is Calexico’s secret sauce. Meanwhile, Burns continues to mine the naturalistic terrain in his lyrics that he has for years, as on “Fractured Air (Tornado Watch).” Angels and devils struggle in stormy weather, while Burns, his voice barely above a whisper, portrays two lovers facing impending loneliness. While it lacks the whimsical audacity of Feast of Wire, Carried to Dust is no less epic in scope, an album full of sonic beauty that unabashedly pays homage to its Southwestern (and beyond) roots. Route 66 sold separately.
The copyright of the article Calexico Uncovers Carried to Dust in Indie Music is owned by Lee Simmons. Permission to republish Calexico Uncovers Carried to Dust in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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