califone: all my friends are funeral singers (dead oceans)
califone make so bloody little out of so bloody much. that’s not meant in the pejorative y’understand, just sometimes they’re so damnably subtle you’d hardly know anything was going on.
born of chicago’s red red meat (bunny gets paid being one of the last few finefinefine records released by sub pop) who (and which) paved the way for califone’s folksy murmurings and electronic burblings. and with each album they refine this formula to bare-boned perfection.
all my friends are funeral singers is part companion piece, part soundtrack to califone honcho tim rutili’s movie of the same name. it’s a film i know bugger all about beyond the psychic-living-with-ghosts-in-old-house premise, but this don’t impact on the absorption in / enjoyment of the album. i guess the themes and stories overlap and complement, but one isn’t required to understand the other. i hear the tour will incorporate both into the live show. which should be pretty ace.
the music is the usual mix of brittle blues and electronic textures. it sounds simple, hushed even, but when you start unpeeling the oniony layers and collage overlaps, picking (hoho…) through the banjo, guitar, piano, fiddle, drum, horns and vintage organs, the complexity of their compositions dawns. reduced you could call it skewed folk but it’s so much more, like if william basinksi recorded dylan’s basement tapes.
it has strange contradictory qualities, whereby it’s junk-rough at times, while also softly tactile, organic yet industrial, tender but unsettling. whether it’s the bass squelch opaque electronics of giving away the bride, a song which radiohead would give up their wonky right eye for, or the more straightforward pop structure of polish girls, which has an understated melody of such weary beauty it brought a little warmth to even my black heart. it is within these disparities califone work so well.
all of this combined with the queered folk threads which run through the whole album, the string-picked stomp of ape-like, the psyche insinuations of buñuel and evidence result in a listening experience so rich, yet so light, you can gorge yourself like a vomit speckled roman emperor for hours. dig deep people, this album is incredibly detailed, a subtle agglomeration of sounds that have a delicious lush cinematic quality.
facetiously i could describe them as wilco’s little brother, or uncle tupelo’s weird nephew — the correlation being jeff tweedy’s willingness to grasp both the dissonant experimental, bucolic blood and dust sides of americana. but i won’t. i’ll leave you, dear readers (listeners), to decipher those mumbled symbols and splashed cymbals yourselves. enjoy!
17/11/2009 at 5:20 pm
i’ve always thought of them as the older kid that wilco met when wilco went to that summer music camp.
17/11/2009 at 6:03 pm
nah.
maybe the boyfriend of califones sisters friend who occasionally loaned them smokes and iron maiden records.