A very good and quietly unassuming band with an impressive-- but decidedly unflashy-- discography, Califone almost dissipated into the ether after the release of 2009’s reliably strong All My Friends are Funeral Singers. The band’s core member Tim Rutili spent almost a year away from Califone, committing his attention to screenwriting, scoring films and TV shows. He shed a few band members during the hiatus, but thankfully not his interest in eventually returning to Califone. He just didn’t want to go back exactly like he had before. For the new Stitches, Rutili hit the road, leaving his familiar environs in Chicago and recording at various locations in the southwestern United States, including Arizona, Texas, and Southern California. He also went back to his roots in home recording, stripping back the dense tangle of rustic instrumentation, electronic atmospherics, and spooky field recordings that distinguished Califone’s past work.
All of those elements exist on Stitches, but in a much less expansive way. This record resides entirely inside Rutili’s head, and conveys his point of view during a solitary period spent amid blank, sun-drenched landscapes. Given Rutili’s cinematic sensibility, it’s no surprise that Stitches often plays like a downbeat existential western from the early 70s. The breathtakingly pretty “moonbath.brainsalt.a.holy.fool” is indicative of the mood on Stitches-- the ticking plunk of piano chords set against sweeping steel guitar sighs instantly conjures images of tumbleweeds blowing across a desolate desert at sunset, presumably as the hero of the story attempts to grapple with some crippling emotional crisis. It doesn’t rise or fall so much as smolder in one place for several minutes. “A Thin Skin of Bullfight Dust” also builds without ever reaching a climax, even as a skittering drum machine causes friction with a glistening banjo lick and dark clouds of disembodied noise.
Califone’s music has always been rooted in this tension between technology and humanity. But on Stitches, Rutili leans a little more heavily on the human element. It’s not strictly a singer-songwriter record, though the focus on Rutili’s vocals and the songwriting is more pronounced than usual-- like on “Movie Music Kills a Kiss,” where the song is framed simply by a plaintive acoustic strum, stinging slide-guitar asides, and a trickling piano. At times, Stitches sounds more like a collection of demos for a Califone record than a Califone record, which suits the starkness of the material. After all, people don’t head to the desert unless they’re hiding from something, and the demons that Rutili describes on Stitches seem particularly druggy and apocalyptic. The lyrics are cryptic and hallucinatory. (“The ghost of you comes clear as day/ emerging from the dark room chemicals,” Rutili sings on “Movie Music Kills a Kiss".) “Magdalene” and “Moses” directly reference Biblical stories about sin and salvation. Even when it’s not always clear what Rutili is talking about on Stitches, the music evokes an unsettling spiritual reckoning.
In total, Stitches is exactly the sort of Americana record that can act as antidote for what’s happening in the genre right now. At a time when “hey!” folk has fully infiltrated rock radio, and made questionably bearded banjo players the guitar shredders of this generation, somebody has to stand up and represent how truly weird and wondrous this music can be. Stitches isn’t a record designed to bowl anybody over-- It eschews easy Mumford-like payoffs. Like desert sand, it slowly washes over until it finally crushes you.
