Calexico - Garden Ruin

It’s true what they say. A good song can act as a sonic salve that nullifies the impediments which the daily grind can sometimes throw your way. It can, for just a brief moment, envelop you within its lingering melody and whisk you away for a few fleeting minutes of respite.

Yes, a finely crafted song, the kind we indelibly commit to memory and carry with us for years, can offer a sweet melody or lyric that compels us to remember when and summons forgotten faces and ghosts from the past. It can amplify your pain or even ameliorate it. It can put a spring in your step and a smile in your heart. It can be anything you want it to be but most importantly, it’s yours – from that moment on it belongs to you.

Calexico’s lushly textured soundscapes and resplendent horns can just about manage to do all of the above. They have been making achingly beautiful music long before they appeared on the hipsters’ music radar and their moody ballads and poetic prose have mended many a broken heart seeking solace in song.

However, after five albums you begin to question the point of crafting emotional outpourings of woe when there is no-one there to hear it. Yes, there’s the self-satisfaction of making music for music’s sake, as well as the ability to wield your artistic merit like a badge, but these days self satisfaction and artistic merit do naught to pay the bills.

So maybe Joey Burns and company have finally come to this realisation. Maybe they’ve heeded the call of the shiny dollar and the unrelenting pull of greater prominence. Every musician wishes to be lionised at some point in their career. Or maybe when you’ve been lauded for your distinctive sound, which has consequently revivified a stagnant genre, the only option left may be to change it. So, with Garden Ruin, Calexico have abandoned their trademark instrumentals and have muted those mariachi horns to deliver a rather mainstream collection of three minute long folk/rock ditties which left the older and crustier fans balking. Who cares about them though?

The horns are still there in part but Garden Ruin offers us simple constructions which rely as heavily on the lyrics as they do on the music. The opener Cruel shows hints of Calexico of old. It’s a bittersweet folk song whose simple acoustic guitar and sonorous vocal belie the tale of despair ensconced within the lyrics. ‘Cruel, cruel grounds, leak truths never found’; Burns sings his invective against environmental corruption with a forlorn and world wearied tone that incongruously sits aside the resplendent horns.

There are elements of that typically South-western sound in Yours and Mine a rather subdued and simply structured folk/country hybrid that only clocks in at two and a half minutes and Bisbee Blues , a seemingly forgettable and nondescript song which is a tribute to the town the album was written in.

The one major change which Garden Ruin heralds is the development of Burns’ song lyrics from just a few vague and formless lines into a vivid narrative; he lucidly paints a picture of a post apocalyptic world wrought to destruction by environmental blunders. It’s vivid and evocative and maintains the argument that good song writing should dispense with the ambiguous in favour of prose that is teeming with imagery. It doesn’t always have to be literal or about semantics but the narrative should eloquently articulate its truth to the listener.

One of Garden Ruin’s biggest appeals is the interplay between the warm and jaunty melodies and the lyrics which are so often steeped in despair. At first Panic Open String appears to be a poignant love song which Burns delivers in a dreamy upper register vocal. That is, until you comprehend the words he is singing, ‘Oceans to the coast will cling to their host, The sun split in two, sink through an empty sky, It’s where we’ll go when we, Leave this place and die.’

Nom de Plume is a curious fusion of steel stringed guitar and spoken word lyrics which Burns drawls in French. It’s a hypnotically dark sound which could have been lifted from a dingy club in a Parisian arrondissement rather than the American heartland it was conceived in. Roka (Danza de la muerte) is one of the album’s standout tracks, an infectious duet with Amparo Sanchez who delivers a sultry vocal amidst the resounding horns and the haunting melody. It best encapsulates the divergent sounds which Calexico span; from their roots oriented foray into Americana to their excursion into jazz and Latino rhythms.

Perhaps the most striking song is the slow burning paean All Systems Red which is their most rock oriented track to date. The acoustic guitar and soft melody give way to a swirl of guitars and Burn’s imploring tone formed around his well crafted prose:

‘Everything you hear is distorted in your head,
Bouncing off the walls, unravelling the thread,
Staying up with the blue screen glow,
Forgetting everything you ever dreamed years ago,
When the dread is flowing down my veins,
I want to tear it all down and bring it up again,
It’s just your heart that’s breaking without choice’.

It feels like Calexico are holding your beating heart in their collective hands and you can almost feel it swell as Burns’ susurration melds into a grief laden howl. We can sit and argue that Garden Ruin is a more mainstream offering than what Calexico fans are used to – and it is – but it’s an accomplished release and there is something incredibly compelling, as well as gratifying, about music that makes you quite happy to wallow in your own misery. It’s safe to say that Calexico have crafted the most resplendently dark album for musical masochists, or those who are heavy of heart, to purge with.

‘Nothing changes and nothing improves’, Burns sings and somewhere deep down you know that it’s true. There will always be debilitating lows waiting just around the corner but Calexico’s sweet sounds, which make your soul soar and your heavy heart sigh for even just the briefest of interims, make you realise that the world ain’t such a bad place after all. It really isn’t – so perhaps someone should tell Joey Burns.