Califone - All My Friends Are Funeral Singers (Dead Oceans)
Califone make so little out of so much. That's not meant in the pejorative you understand, just sometimes they’re so bloody subtle you’d hardly know anything was going on.
The band was born of Chicago's Red Red Meat, whose Bunny Gets Paid was one of the finest records released by Sub Pop, and one which paved the way for Califone’s folksy murmurings meets electronic burblings. With each release they refine this formula to bare-boned perfection.
All My Friends Are Funeral Singers is part companion piece, part soundtrack to Califone honcho Tim Rutili’s movie of the same name. It's a film I don’t know much about beyond the psychic-living-with-ghosts-in-old-house premise, but thankfully this doesn’t impact on the absorption in/enjoyment of the album. I guess the themes and stories overlap and complement, but one isn’t required to understand the other, although they will apparently tour and incorporate both into the live show.
The music is the usual mix of brittle blues and electronic textures. It sounds simple, hushed even, but when you start unpeeling the onion layers and collage overlaps, picking through the banjo, guitar, piano, fiddle, drum, horns and vintage organs, the complexity of their compositions dawns. Reduced you could call it skewed folk but it’s so much more, as if William Basinksi recorded Dylan’s basement tapes.
It has strange contradictory qualities, whereby it’s junk-rough at times, while also softly textured, organic yet industrial — tender but unsettling. Whether it’s the bass squelch opaque electronics of "Giving Away The Bride," a song which Radiohead would give up their wonky right eye for, or the more straightforward pop structure of "Polish Girls," which has an understated melody of such weary beauty it brought a little warmth to even my black heart. It is within these disparities Califone works so well.
All these things combined with the queered folk threads which run through the whole album, the string-picked stomp of "Ape-like," the psyche insinuations of "Bunuel" and "Evidence" result in a listening experience so rich, yet so light, you can gorge yourself for hours. Dig deep people, this album is incredibly detailed, a subtle agglomeration of sounds that have a delicious lush cinematic quality.
Facetiously I could describe them as Wilco’s little brother, or Uncle Tupelo’s weird nephew — the correlation being Jeff Tweedy’s willingness to grasp both the dissonant experimental, bucolic blood and dust sides of Americana — but I won’t. I’ll leave you, dear readers (listeners), to decipher those mumbled symbols and splashed cymbals yourselves.
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