Califone – Quicksand/Cradlesnakes

Though he didn’t truly harness its possibilities until 2001’s Roomsound, Califone singer and chief songwriter Tim Rutili (ex-Red Red Meat) has been steeping his strange brew of roots and rock for more than a decade. Now, however, his band sits at the center of something resembling a scene in its native Chicago, uniting local rock and jazz players (among them new drummer Joe Adamik and guest cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm) and attracting such sonic cousins as the Boas, Fruit Bats, and out-of-towners Ugly Casanova.

On Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, Califone’s second studio LP and first for Thrill Jockey, the quartet’s music is fractured yet familiar, complex but not numbingly so, and maybe best described deep in “Vampiring Again”, a fairly conventional rock song that bobs up from the musical murk toward the album’s end. Delivered in Rutili’s muttered rasp, a lonely fragment of phrase captures the contradictions in Califone’s unconventional sound: “Carry the flatlands in the base of your spine/The city is rusting there.”

You can hear the flatlands in these songs, based as they are on wizened folk forms — witness recent addition Jim Becker’s old-timey fiddle on “Million Dollar Funeral” — and country blues. But they’re filtered through the sooty haze of squalling guitars, electronic blips and effects, and mainstay Ben Massarella’s heavy, thrumming percussion.

Rutili’s words come out similarly garbled. For every stirring image (“Blackbirds in formation blown/Like thumbtacks spilling across a marble sky”), there are three that seem scattered, or simply obtuse. The result is an album that’s both fascinating to listen to and frustrating to try to grasp.