Folk, Film Noir, Alt Country, Latin and Jazz. The Tucson, Arizona band’s fourth album is a celebration of frontier crossing, where geopolitical and personal dramas unfold.
Very early on it was about dancing between the chairs with Joey Burns (guitar, vocals) and John Convertino (drums). During their engagement with Howe Gelb’s Giant Sand, the two musicians from Tucson/Arizona began to develop those variations of desert rock that grew in swing in their own band Calexico and outgrew the sounds and textures of their predecessor: film noir soundtracks sought their peace in folk songs and alt-country spheres. FEAST Of WIRE in 2003 was the high mass of this merger, the spectrum ranged from the Tex-Mex mood song to the Latin Shufe, who hung deep in melancholy (“Quattro”) to the electro-acoustic sci-fi theater (“Attack El Robot! Attack!) and a dangerously name-dropping pop song called “Not Even Stevie Nicks”.
Joey Burns tells the story of a suicide that, according to the popular interpretation, is “accompanied” by Fleetwood Mac music on the car radio: “With a head like a vulture / And a heart full of hornets / He drives of the clif / Into the blue,” and not even Stevie Nicks could help the poor soul. The drama occupies key points here, Burns carries the images from the US-Mexican borderlands into dreamlike musical spheres, and even if the tragedies take their course, this Latin folk jazz is there for us listeners at the end – a wellness pool so close to the chirping of the guitars in the deserts of sound.
A geopolitical-private border crossing deluxe
Perhaps the most intense five minutes of music Calexico has ever recorded can be found on the album’s fourth track, Black Heart: film drama, pedal steel guitars, heavy, distorted beats and a torrent of a howl-your-mouth melody; Music in the name of the global losers, a geopolitical-private border crossing deluxe. A program that was chosen to bring an indie rock audience on board far outside.
Live, Calexico knew how to impressively play off their freshly born crossover sounds in very different places, as the ten extra songs from the “China Theater” (recorded in Stockholm in 2003) testify to. City Slang has now re-released FEAST OF WIRE on a triple album (double CD) including the live recordings and the single “Alone Again Or” for their 20th anniversary. The song that the band Love featured on their FOREVER CHANGES album 36 years earlier could have been written directly for Calexico with that Herb Alpert-style Tijuana brass sound and that flamenco guitar. In 2003, the Handclaps transformed “Alone Again Or” into a celebration of loneliness, which turned out to be very ambivalent.