ALBUM REVIEW: Calexico Weaves a Magical Mirage on ‘El Mirador’

Though the Southwest has always been woven into the fabric of their music, Calexico’s 10th studio album, El Mirador, is a true love letter to the region. With brushstrokes of textured instrumentals, the group paints the vast deserts and big skies surrounding the place where the album came together. Since the pandemic, they’ve spread out to El Paso and Boise, but convened in Tuscon at multi-instrumentalist Sergio Mendoza’s home studio. Inspired by the landscape, the songs on El Mirador vibrate like living, breathing beings thanks to John Convertino’s shakers and cymbals, Mendoza’s congas, and Joey Burns’ slinky vocals and guitars.

Effortlessly interspersing Spanish and English verses, Burns’ harmonies — made richer at various points with the help of vocalists Gaby Moreno, Beth Goodfellow, and Sam Beam — are as smooth as sand-brushed gems. Trumpets, pedal steel, and strings elevate these vivid soundscapes that vacillate between sunny and shimmering, and dangerous and simmering. “When reservoirs run dry / Celestial skies wane / Blurred with our naked eye / All we feel to hope and to change,” Burns sings, ghostly, on the foreboding “Constellation.” On the rootsy-twangy “Rancho Azul,” Burns crafts a figure of a woman in a “veil as black as night” out west where “all points vanish.” And on the especially atmospheric title track and album opener, Burns’ whimsically whispers of the place where there is “no one around for miles and miles.”

The celebratory “Cumbia del Polvo,” which hums with the synthy touch of DJ Camilo Lara, captures the beauty of the desert best. “Dust in my hair / dust in my shoes,” sings Burns. “Monsoon rains come / Gonna wash us away.” In a place “where the sun won’t die and the summer never ends,” Calexico finds the beating heart of their sound. Through these conjured images of a place at once so harsh and breathtaking, the band creates their own magical mirage.