Calexico
Hot Rail
»
Calexico
Hot Rail
Quarterstick, 2000
RiYL: Tim/Jeff Buckley, Palace, Giant Sand |
It's a good barometer for an album that is at once Calexico's least eccentric and most serious. "Fade," one of Burns and John Convertino's longest compositions ever (at over seven minutes), is a breezy whisper over hypnotic, suspenseful cool-jazz jamming (featuring Rob Mazurek on cornet), as if Tim Buckley were fronting Miles Davis' quintet.
Burns' languid ballad "Service And Repair" best summarizes the quiet mood of the album. Largely gone are the cinematic soundscapes inspired by the desert (the few surviving examples display an ambient, even funereal quality, as in "Untitled III" and "Mid-Town"). Instead, Calexico have opted for a more intimate form of expression: stylish, somber, bleak ballads that draw from both psychedelic and ambient music. Even the pair's country roots are complimented by a tinge of mariachi.
Appropriately, the album's closing tracks are another energetic mariachi dance ("Tres Avisos") and a solemn, eastern-flavored, quasi-new age chamber piece ("Hot Rail," again recalling Tim Buckley's dreamiest scores). The duo seems torn between a philosophical and populist soul, and the former is slowly taking over. In the process, Calexico is leaving rock behind and approaching classical music.
PIERO SCARUFFI | Piero Scaruffi runs the exhaustive music database Scaruffi.com. A native of Italy, he has also been praised for his work on the General Theory of Relativity, formal theories of the mind, and artificial intelligence. And no, we aren't making that up.