Calexico rarely make explicitly political songs, though circumstances can sometimes make them feel that way. Over the last two decades, the Arizona band’s principals, Joey Burns and John Convertino, have written often about transient workers, the homes that they make and the ones they leave behind; their music, too, crosses borders, blending American folk traditions with styles rooted in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. Even more than its predecessors, the band’s impassioned ninth album, The Thread That Keeps Us, is dedicated to immigrant experiences and the pains of displacement. As always, Calexico are more interested in storytelling than grandstanding, but it’s hard to miss the role that border politics and environmental disasters play in the band’s latest batch of character sketches and vignettes. This is an album that pointedly humanizes the disenfranchised people whose voices are too often shut out of policy debates.
Calexico recorded the LP in California, and you can hear the impact of the wildfires that have blighted that state and their native Arizona in the past year all over Thread. Burns fills the record with imagery of falling ashes, smoke-stung eyes and abandoned homes. “Running through fields of flowers and smoke/Leaving behind all that we’ve built,” he sings on the brooding “Voices in the Field,” a song that embodies the album’s tougher tone. “My focus was blurred as the world became consumed,” he sings on “Bridge to Nowhere,” over clenched guitars that conjure the destruction. The emotional subject matter gives the band cover to play to the rafters in a way they don’t frequently do. Introducing the apocalyptic imagery that carries through the album, opener “End of the World With You” announces itself with a gust of pomp and grandeur right out of a Broken Social Scene album, while. The chest-beating “Eyes Wide Awake” is driven by a tense, distinctly “Where is My Mind”-esque guitar riff, building to a dramatic fanfare from the band’s dual trumpeters.
Those tracks offer potent reminders of what an effective meat-and-potatoes indie-rock band Calexico can be, though as is usually the case with Calexico albums, Thread’s most memorable pleasures lie in its worldly tangents and genre fusions. “Flores y Tamales,” sung in Spanish by Jairo Zavala, one of the band’s many crack multi-instrumentalists, lightens the album at its halfway point with mariachi horns and a cumbia rhythm. “Under the Wheels” spins a ghostly reggae shuffle into a gregarious art-funk number with shades of ’80s Bowie, while “Another Space” nods to Bitches Brew with wild scribbles of trumpet and guitar.
Throughout, Thread is noisier and messier around the edges than its predecessors, with an overarching turbulence that creeps into even its more upbeat songs. Even “The Town & Miss Lorraine,” a 1960s sunshine-folk throwback with a chipper orchestral accompaniment, is upended by tragedy: “There’s a bad accident on the interstate/A snake of engine oil reaching out,” Burns sings. And on “Dead in the Water,” the closest the album comes to directly commenting on the Trump doctrine, a blustery antagonist wields his power vindictively, threatening “a new kind of wrath.”
That sense of chaos and danger is what distinguishes Thread from the many similarly far-reaching records that Calexico have released since the late ’90s. They’ve been around long enough that they’ve lost much of their capacity to surprise; at some point, they fell into a pattern of making very solid hangout records, where even their most adventurous stylistic gambits began to feel like a kind of comfort food. This album’s clear stakes, though, make it feel vital in spite of that familiarity. Calexico have made records that sound like this one before, but they’ve never made one with quite this much fight in it.
