Demob Happy

Enter planet dust 8.5/10 ‘Carried to Dust‘ is Calexico’s most mature work to date, arguably the best synthesis of their frontier atmospherics and Latin-inflected country songwriting. The follow-up to 2005′s much-dismissed ‘Garden Ruin’, ‘Carried to Dust’ makes the ‘South-Western noir’ tag stick better than any other Calexico album. It’s a record of great dusky beauty, [...]

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Spaghetti westerns and pulp fiction 6/10 Calexico’s second album is a sprawling, doom-laden and cinematic work that draws heavily on latin jazz, mariachi, country and gypsy folk. Typically rich in the kind of malevolent desert imagery and border country narratives that suggest the novels of Cormac McCarthy, ‘Black Light‘ explores territory that is more fully [...]

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Excellent mini-album 7/10 Iron & Wine and Calexico have collaborated well on this fine EP, which pits Samuel Beam’s alt-country credentials against the latter band’s widescreen musicianship. It is an easy match, since Beam’s soft, sometimes melancholic vocals are not dissimilar to that of Calexico’s Joey Burns. Whereas Iron & Wine is a solitary lo-fi [...]

Iron & Wine / Calexico - He Lays in the Reins [ 3:44 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Feast of fun 9/10 Calexico’s sound inhabits the frontier badlands of the American Southwest, a cinematic multi-instumental brew that takes in jazz, alt-country, Mariachi, folk and electronics. It’s a widescreen affair, a mixture of traditional rootsy Americana (‘Quattro’) and brooding instrumental mood pieces (‘Pepita’, ‘Across The Wire’) that evoke rust and dust choked border towns. [...]

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