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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Bloodier, less simple 9/10 In ‘No Country for Old Men’ the Coen brothers return to Texas and the noir-western hybrid of their first film ‘Blood Simple‘. An adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s equallly bloodythirsty and apocalyptic novel of the same name, the film captures the spirit of the author’s work while providing a platform for their [...]

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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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The thrill of the chase 8/10 Mel Gibson might have alienated a core part of his audience by choosing to film in a dead Mayan dialect, but Apocalypto’s cinematic conceit is universal: this is a chase movie, and a very good one. In fact, anyone who has watched a movie in foreign language will have [...]

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Four-story tower of Babel 7/10 Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest film follows in the footsteps of his previous works Amores Perros and, significantly, 21 Grams. It mirrors the latter film’s fundamental contrivance by interweaving several seemingly disparate stories operating on different timescales and, in this film, time zones. This is becoming almost a clichéd mini-genre in [...]

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Cinematic masterpiece 9/10 The Power and the Glory is arguably Graham Greene’s masterpiece and is one of the greatest books written about Mexico by a gringo (see also Malcome Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy). As with much of Greene’s ‘serious’ literary works (as opposed to the so-called ‘entertainments’), the narrator’s internal [...]

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Once upon a time in Mexico 9/10 I’d never been greatly compelled to read a book in such a typically cinematic genre, but this is incredible. It combines the bloodthirsty epic sweep of the great Sergio Leone spagetti westerns with the harsh realism of later revisionist works such as Unforgiven. All this described in a [...]

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