Calexico
Carried to Dust
Quarterstick Records
By Mike Randall
There’s always been a sense of frontier adventure present in Calexico’s music. From their days as an instrumental duo up through the more song-oriented Garden Ruin, the idyllic American West has been their muse from the vantage point of their home base of Tucson, Arizona. Stationed an hour from the Mexican border, they’ve had the perfect seat to let the Latin flair cross the country line right to them, even if it wasn’t intended. Now that they’re a band capable of filling venues the world over, Calexico has been able to visit many of the places they’ve been inspired by or written about, and not just from a tourist angle. What lies in Carried to Dust is a travel journal that brings us inside barrios, carries forth invitations to fiestas and offers a pioneer spirit that is as warm as the Yucatan air.
Although remaining lo-fi in a sense, Dust comes off as a less organic effort than Garden Ruin, despite claims that the songs began as stripped-down ideas between core members Joey Burns and John Convertino. There’s an epic aura to it, as if Dust is the full cinematic version to Garden Ruin’s black-and-white sketch. While there were traces of this direction on songs like “Roka” and “Nom de Plume,” Garden Ruin mostly silenced the mariachi-style horns present on Calexico’s earlier work in favor of more of a conventional Gram Parsons country feel. Here the brass is back in a big way, combining the storytelling nature of Garden Ruin with the sonic authenticity of earlier releases like Feast of Wire.
Getting things started with “Victor Jara’s Hands,” a song about a murdered Chilean musician and political activist, Calexico makes it clear that although the vibe is festive, Carried to Dust isn’t all tequila shots. Above chants of “Olé-olé-olé-olé” and a breeze of Western guitars and warm mariachi trumpets, “Hands” sounds as if you’re standing in the middle of a village square as a soccer game breaks out on one side while the ocean carries a bevy of surfers on its palm on another. “House of Valparaiso” returns the focus to Chile, this time referencing families in exile, as Sam Beam drops by to continue the partnership that began on In the Reins. “Red Blooms,” the most daring track on the record, finds Calexico pulling up the curtain on the poverty that envelopes many of the cultures represented in their music, revealing a tension that somehow doesn’t get in the way of the spirit. This flavor is also evident during songs like “Fractured Air (Tornado Watch)” or “The News About William,” which sounds like a gunfight is on the horizon as a village surveys the damage of marauders that have recently passed through.
Despite the heavy topics, the music is bursting with a propelling, spicy energy that’s built for dancing. The samba-seasoned rhythm and native tongue of “Inspiración” the warm moonlight glare of “Bend in the Road” and the fiery instrumental “El Gatillo (Trigger Revisited)” pull the western frontier further into the indie world than it ever has before, and Calexico gets some help to do it. Aside from the aforementioned Beam and among others, Tortoise’s Doug McCombs lends a helping hand to “Contention City,” but it’s vocalist Pieta Brown that steals the show on the gorgeous desert-country duet, “Slowness.” Described by Burns as one of the lone love songs on the record, Brown contributes a moment of tenderness and reflection alongside a record filled with tracks that feel like nonstop movement.
While the vocals can at time be a little low in the mix or the Spanish can get lost in translation, the point of Carried to Dust is exploration and energy. This is a record that lives by the phrase ‘it’s not the destination, it’s the journey,’ and the journey is full of life’s peaks and valleys to the soundtrack of a racing heartbeat. Through murder, theft, destitution there’s an undying spirit that can’t be silenced – not as long as there’s music playing, and Calexico’s here to provide it.
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