We've come to expect it from Calexico: songs that deal in sad, seedy lamentation. The feeling you get when you need to talk to someone and everyone in town already knows too much of your business. Paralyzed wanderlust. Musically, Garden Ruin finds Calexico branching out in previously unexplored directions, opening with two absolutely solid tracks, as "Cruel" swaggers along with their almost trademark southwestern feel, while "Yours and Mine" builds with a slow burn, as Joey Burns adds hushed vocals. Here is where I'm expecting the horns to kick in full force, but instead the up-tempo swan song “Letter to Bowie Knife” blasts through.
It's not as if Calexico have abandoned their Southwestern conceits. “Roka” features the same wheezy accordions, south-of-the-border horns, plucked nylon-string guitar and an irresistible smattering of Spanish-language vocals. The ballads on this record, accompanied by beautiful, slightly hallucinatory storytelling courtesy of Burns, come together as a well-conceived whole. It helps that Calexico is all over the stylistic map here. Songs like “Deep Down” and “All Systems Red” are cinematic in a way that recalls your favorite cross-country trek in a beat-up Impala.
Calexico's compositions attest to how much Calexico value their music, history and talent. The record evokes images of at time that we can only glimpse back to in yellowed photographs, where a man can sit outside of his house in Old Mexico and strum his guitar with no other purpose than to hear it sing.
Overall, Garden Ruin's quality speaks for itself, and cements Calexico's reputation as more than just "that indie rock band with Mariachi horns". Although not every track here is of the highest quality, all sixteen tracks are expertly woven together. This is widescreen listening at its finest. |