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Calexico
Garden Ruin
Few bands strive for a sound that is both original and entirely immersed in landscape. The music of Calexico mirrors the complexities and evolution of the Sonoran Desert. What was once a dusty expanse of small towns, sky-island mountain ranges and endless vistas of cacti, Arizona's Sonoran Desert is rapidly being converted into a dense urban environment. And though there are still many open expanses, this changing desert environment is coming into a new reality. For every saguaro there's a new house with a swimming pool. For every dirt road a multi-lane highway is being built. Growth, for better or worse, reveals itself as a theme.
Reflecting on this growth is Calexico's newest release, Garden Ruin, a sleeker, cleaner, divergence from its previous recordings. With Garden Ruin, the group has replaced some of the sound that had aligned it with the harshness of the desert with a sound that is a bit more palatable, perhaps described metaphorically as supplying an old pickup with an air conditioner. It is Calexico's most accessible album and also a testament of its ability to continually evolve and change with its surrounding environments.
Joey Burns and John Convertino form the core of Calexico. The two met in Los Angeles in the early 90s where they played with Howe Gelb in the experimental rock group Giant Sand. In 1994, Burns and Convertino moved to Tuscon where they quickly teamed up with Bill Elm to form the Friends of Dean Martinez. After a couple of years playing as Friends of Dean Martinez, in 1996 the three parted ways and Burns and Convertino formed Spoke (later changing the name to Calexico). A growing success, Calexico now tours extensively and has a large following in Europe; it was a German label that signed the group to its first a record deal. Calexico has recorded many albums over the years, with a few reaching critical acclaim and success.
Its 1998 concept album, The Black Light, recordings about the desert of Arizona and northern Mexico, was called one of the best records of the year in a Wall Street Journal review.
Over the next five years, despite frequent releases of new work, Calexico limited many releases to distribution only at live shows. In 2003, Calexico released Feast of Wire, the album that turned me onto Calexico, a riveting collage of songs that explores the pulse and soul of the Southwest.
Feast of Wire shows Calexico's growth and maturation as a band, its ability and desire to change its sound, and a refusal to stagnate.
Following In the Reins, a successful collaboration with the group Iron, Calexico returned to the studio to record Garden Ruin. Its first album that does not use an instrumental track, Garden Ruin is a confident and concise release. It reflects Burns and Convertino's growth as songwriters and musicians and, although Garden Ruin maintains a distinct Calexico sound, many die-hard fans will notice a sound that is constructed with quality, a cleanness, in mind.
Songs such as "Cruel" reveal the essence of this newly evolved sound. It is a fantastic song that builds slowly to a rousing crescendo of horns with Burns' songwriting talent leading the piece to its pivotal moment. All the elements of the classic Calexico tune are there: varied instrumentation of horns, piano, acoustic, electric and steel guitar, Convertino's steady drumbeats keeping steady rhythm, and great musical arrangement. But this time crisper and cleaner than we've heard in previous Calexico recordings. The song ends in a quiet whisper of vocal interchanges . . . a subtle break . . . and then the next track, the peaceful "Yours and Mine," picks up - a satisfying and clear result of the influence of collaborating with Nancy Sinatra, Iron and Wine and Neko Case.
One of my personal Garden Ruin favorites, of which there are many, includes the album's lone rock 'n' roll track, "Letter to Bowie Knife." It is a supercharged rant of electric guitar and lyrics that point to a duality of existence in the modern world: Dipped in the ink of the fight/Written clean through the night/Mark my words upon the front page/To set my world straight/It's too late/Just like I found it, my world is split/Right down the spine.
With Garden Ruin, Calexico continues its emergence as one of the most original acts in music today. With every album, the group illustrates its refusal to stagnate, growing and evolving like the ever-changing landscape of its southern Arizona home. We can only expect more from the hard-charging Calexico, a fascinating group we Southwesterners can call our own.
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