Album Review: Calexico – The Thread That Keeps Us


The Thread That Keeps Us



It may be that, speaking from the ultimate devil’s advocate position, we end up thanking Donald Trump for being elected President of the United States.

This statement will make many throw up their hands in outrage but hear us out; few events in history have triggered so many responses through the medium of sound, and whilst some of those have been horrendous (see: Eminem’s Revival), channeling the anger, shock and frustration many more liberal Americans felt on hearing the news has equally put many artists on a plangent near-war footing of their own.

Calexico don’t really fit the profile of militants, but whilst the Tucson band/collective’s fluid line-up and boundary pushing approach has sustained them across what The Thread That Keeps Us makes ten albums, lynchpin Joey Burns has admitted that it was Trump’s surprise win which chiefly motivated them to follow-up Edge Of The Sun.

Those who take their politics in the smallest possible doses will be pleased, however, that opener The End Of The World is not an apocalyptic sermon but instead a gritty modern love song, one about sustaining a form of romance whilst seemingly we’re all one wrong expression from disaster, it’s expression rustily warm and hopeful. As their career has proven, in this environment the lines aren’t always so straight; on Under The Wheels they splice Tex-Mex, ska and cowboy disco, Burns navigating between whisper and croon as he pulls at our subconscious fears of facing the outside world’s unforgiving nature.

The situation from one man’s perspective may be dire, but the Calexico way is to leave much lying in the tall grass for listeners to discover themselves, an invitation to explore done here via a trio of differing instrumentals, the eddying, trumpet led sweetness of Unconditional Waltz, Shortboard broods and Spinball teeters on the edge of decaying post-rock.

One of the responses to having a confrontation with your fears is to retreat into the past – here the bygone ministrations of The Town & Miss Lorraine are a reminder of simpler times, whilst the Mariachi flourishes of Flores Y Tamales are evocations of somewhere apparently now lost, a postcard in monochrome if anyone wants to hitch a ride back there.

This sensation – of being dislocated and in two or three times and places at once – is possibly due to the album’s recording process, for which Burns and co left Arizona’s pavement melting summer heat for a studio on the more temperate coast of northern California. As a result, sounds and styles change like the scenery; Voices In The Field’s arid guitar and twisted country takes inspiration from poems written by Syrian refugees, but on closer Music Box the where is coincidental, the device of the title a gift intended to be both a protector and a keepsake.

In the end, Calexico’s message is the simplest of all, that love for one another will always be far stronger than the hate the current wave of those would-be planetary overlords thrive on.

It’s The Thread That Keeps Us, whoever and wherever we may be, one that their music gently and with compassion reminds us of existing, as well as that hope is always free.



(Andy Peterson)


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