Demob Happy

FIRST PUBLISHED AT THE LINE OF BEST FIT
White Denim - Fits
8/10
Such is the strength and depth (to borrow a football cliché) of music Stateside at the moment that I find myself with three acts on heavy rotation at the moment from Austin, Texas, alone. OK, so Spoon haven’t done anything lately but they’re a band [...]

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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, varied and [...]

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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 proposition, Calexico [...]

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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. Dubbed ‘desert-rock’ [...]

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