Califone – Roots & Crowns

Califone comes from a long (but not necessarily straight) line of musicians whose avoidance of the ordinary results in a fascinatingly convoluted manner of creating music. The worst examples frustrate the most ardent listener’s patience; the best simply find a new path to the heart and soul of the matter.

Roots & Crowns is among the best, perhaps thanks to the experience of founding members Tim Rutili and Ben Massarella and regular producer Brian Deck in the art-indie combo Red Red Meat. They have the years and the ears to understand what works and what doesn’t.

Here, almost everything works. The opening track, “Pink & Sour”, gives the jitters to tribal funk. “Black Metal Valentine” rolls an introductory series of found noises into a spare, jazzy meditation. “Spider’s House” reconfigures the Beatles’ psychedelic whimsy into something more arid and cautious.

Among all the tape manipulations and sonic improvisations, though, Califone also locates songs that are quite naturalistic. The back-porch ruminations of “Sunday Noises”, the delicately plinking folk of “Our Kitten Sees Ghosts”, and the fiddle-garnished tranquility of “Burned By The Christians” cradle Rutili’s voice, which doesn’t need range to find immense introspective expressiveness.

He doesn’t need to compose a linchpin for Roots & Crowns, either: Psychic TV already did so with “The Orchids”, a sparkling, buzzing song that holds the album’s center. Its central couplet, “In the morning after the night/I fall in love with the light,” is the opposite of convolution, and it seems to guide Califone along its uncommon path.