Sung At Your Grave

It's hard for me to believe that Califone are on their ninth album. They've been releasing material for just over 10 years now, yet it's been 3 years since their last album "Roots & Crowns". To clarify how they can do 9 albums in 11 years with what was just a 3 year gap, well, they released 2 albums apiece in 2002 and 2003. And assuming you've not been following the great Chicago band for these past 11 years (few people have), you should know - every Califone album is excellent (save for maaaybe one...I'm looking at you, "Sometimes Good Weather Follows Bad People"). But the grand point is that this band may have lived quite a bit and released a whole lot of material, but if they're anything, it's consistent.

Part of what makes Califone so great is their ability to confound expectations and twist what would normally be a folksy almost alt-country sound and turn it into something experimentally odd yet still rooted in the familiar. They do it yet again on their new album "All My Friends Are Funeral Singers," and once again the results are and aren't exactly what you might expect. For example, opening track "Giving Away the Bride" immediately confounds what you think is coming by delivering pure beats and one hell of an electric bass line. This, of course, sounding closer to electronica rather than the rough folk you might normally anticipate. As the song draws closer to its inevitable conclusion, you start to hear little things creep in to the mix, such as kitchen pot percussion and then some deft piano. The way the entire song develops is a magical revelation in and of itself, and that's what makes "Giving Away the Bride" one of the finest Califone tracks to date. Most of the rest of the album stays in check with acoustic and sometimes countrified tracks, but thanks to the help of lots of distortion, some bits of dialogue and the occasional xylophone, these songs never sound stale or unoriginal. That's one thing Califone has done right from the beginning, and continues to do right to this day.

One of the most interesting aspects about "All My Friends Are Funeral Singers" is that the music was intended to function as a legitimate soundtrack to a film of the same name made by frontman Tim Rutili. The movie itself is set for screenings at several film festivals next year, but if you happen to catch the band on tour supporting this album, they will play the album live accompanied by the film (or is it vice versa?). So buying a ticket to a Califone show gets you a movie and the music. Now some soundtracks sound like they were specifically written with particular themes or transitions in mind, and thereby don't always work in a pure sonic context. That is to say, the music isn't as strong without the images on film to back it up. In this case, given that most all of us will be exposed to the music before the film, I can honestly say that the songs work just fine on their own. You can't necessarily distinguish the thematic material from the lyrics, though the voices of dialogue that float in and out of a couple songs may provide some clue as to how these things fit together. For the record though, and I found out about this through research, the film plot here concerns a psychic woman living alone in the woods who discovers ghosts in her house, so she tries to get rid of them and in turn they attempt to destroy her life.

No matter what context you hear "All My Friends Are Funeral Singers" in, the album still represents yet another excellent effort from Tim Rutili & Co. Of course by now such brilliance is sort of Califone's trademark, and how they've been able to do it so well for so long is really anybody's guess. But it gets me excited every time they put something new out, because listening to it always makes for an engaging experience. So here's me once again recommending another Califone album, which I'm more than happy to do. If you've not exposed yourself to the genius of this band yet, please do so as soon as possible. I'm just grateful to have a band like this in my life, and I hope you are or will be too.

Califone- Funeral Singers
Califone- Ape-Like

Buy "All My Friends Are Funeral Singers" from Dead Oceans

Labels: califone, chicago bands