Album Reviews

Calexico - Carried to Dust

A new Calexico album is seldom something new. Instead, the nouveau-Western band’s albums evoke the pleasure of rediscovering a favorite book: poring over familiar passages, returning to a forgotten place. After almost twenty years of making music together, Calexico’s newest album, Carried to Dust, is an enjoyable embrace of nuance rather than novelty. There is comfort in the shuffling song structures, crystalline guitar strums, and melancholic horns, which revisit Calexico’s border-conscious songs for the Spaghetti Western and the lonesome drifter. Joey Burns’s gravelly voice calls you closer to whisper a secret in your ear. Or tell a story. In songs like “Two Silver Trees,” Burns explores the desolate space between notes—a minimal desert of sound. The album wanders into territory infused with Norteño sound from northern Mexico, soulful Spanish rhythms, and the imagery of an evolving American West. Calexico may not be new, but the band’s sound is forever pushing onward.

<1/4 Stick Records>

-Drew Tewksbury

Flaunt Magazine Issue 97

Printable PDF from Flaunt Magazine

Related posts:

1. Foreign Born - Person to Person
2. Dungen - 4
3. Fussible from Nortec Collective
4. Death - …For the Whole World to See
5. Battles: Tonto + EP

© 2008 Drew Tewksbury: Multimedia Journalist.