With their eighth album, Roots & Crowns, Califone have hit a possible peak in an already strong career making experimental indie folk-rock. It is both their most sweepingly coherent artistic statement and their most accessible batch of melodies and arrangements.
Califone is the greatest sort of experimental group; one which grounds its ideas in a heavily organic setting, so that the tricks and departures are mere adornments to the songs, rather than the heart of them. Here the music's roots are in pure, natural folk and blues, but depart in ways which make this a very atypical Americana record.
The multi-instrumentalists of the band use mostly acoustic instrumentation as the groundwork for expansion, discreetly layering their songs with numerous instruments in a way that manages to sound sparse, though it is evident that there are many factors at work adding subtly to the whole. The lilting ""Spider's House"" creates a dazzling array of trumpet, bass clarinet, chimes, vibraphone, and organ amidst Tim Rutili's serene vocals but rarely are any of those elements piled heavily on each other. Instead, each creates a distinctive voice.
In ""The Eye You Lost in the Crusade,"" the forward motion halts several times to reveal an in-limbo period of sporadic, electronic sounds and blips which seem to come from outside the previously established bounds of the song. Amidst this, a distorted guitar creeps in with a new rhythm and melody, and then somehow the song seems to fall right back into place and pick up where it left off. It creates a feeling of precisely executed looseness and well-organized chaos, an aesthetic which pervades a lot of the material on Roots & Crowns.
The album is intensely rhythmic—through the distinctive, multi-faceted percussion in some places, or simply the momentum of the simple acoustic guitar in others—which lends an almost spiritual, tribal feel to songs such as the driving ""A Chinese Actor"" and the stream-of-consciousness flow of ""Black Metal Valentine.""
Vocalist Tim Rutili, whose voice sounds a bit like Kurt Cobain in ""Something in the Way"" mode, wraps the songs with pristinely understated lyrics. At times they even meld so well with the music that it is difficult to fully decipher what he's singing, but meaning is still conveyed in one form or another. The fragmented thoughts of the words portray little poetic pieces of story rather than any kind of full narrative, as if it's the enunciation and sound of the words themselves that have the most significance. The album's opener, ""Pink & Sour,"" for example, starts with ""Along your skin, lost my language/ Black lip and red carnation, safe house safe,"" perfectly intertwined with the beat.
One of the finest, most intriguing moments on Roots & Crowns comes in a cover of Psychic TV's ""The Orchids."" The song is given a complete reworking from its industrial-dance origins, becoming a beautiful, shimmering folk song on which Rutili sings ""And in the morning after night/ I fall in love with the light."" He has said in interviews that the song was the inspiration for the whole album, and as such, it works magnificently as an uplifting centerpiece. Califone are a unique entity in today's world of indie rock, a band which manages to be strongly reverent to the traditional American music they draw from, yet also exceedingly creative and cutting-edge.
