Inevitably, at some point in late summer, the landscape becomes vaguely obscene: August air gets thick and throbbing, heavy with a richness that's almost menacing. The sun hovers, uncomfortably plump. Lawn crickets yawn and twitter in double speed, their collective whispers slowly spinning into a single, disembodied howl. Everything else turns way too green.
Listening to Califone's sweaty, blues-heavy scrap-rock is not an entirely dissimilar sensory experience: devious, fertile, and dangerously pretty, Califone records sound as futuristic as they do ancient, and as familiar as they do strange. With loops dredged from riverbeds and vocals rolled in salt, Califone spew a hoarse mix of synthesized sounds, sweeping guitars, and bizarre, snickering percussion, an enigmatic mix of real and imagined sounds.
The band's latest, Heron King Blues, is no less curious-- it's impossible to tell if the record's echoing pings were tapped out on drums, programmed into laptops, or snatched from a dripping basement sink, each gleaming, viscous plop caught, unknowingly, on tape. Thus, the serendipity of Califone: the accidental orchestration, the mysterious creaks, the bits of poetry, the eerie omnipresence, the perfect, unnamable noise.
Although not exactly a concept album, Heron King Blues was inspired, at least tangentially, by frontman Tim Rutili's recurring dream about a half-man, half-bird creature (check the freaked-out cover art), and brought into gritty fruition on the heels of Rutili's subsequent epiphany: the character his subconscious had (presumably) spun from nothing boasted inexplicable roots in ancient Druid legend.
The story, as Rutili tells it, goes like this: a mischievous band of Roman soldiers discovered, in the final days of an otherwise pitiful siege against England, that their enemy lived in perpetual fear of a half-man, half-bird creature known as the Heron King. Hoisting a Roman solider onto stilts and slapping a heron mask over his face, the Romans sent a tipsy Heron King decoy careening into the middle of a British camp, watching as lines of English soldiers scurried off in terror.
There are other Heron King fables circulating, and loads of half-man, half-bird deities nesting snug in leather-bound history books, but the actual circumstances of the King's story are mostly irrelevant: what matters is that Heron King Blues is possessed by the same kind of sweeping, metaphysical realization that goes hand-in-hand with discovering that you are, in fact, dreaming legends. The resulting album is haunting, nervous, and shaking with catharsis.
On Califone's last studio LP, 2003's Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, Rutili and longtime percussionist Ben Massarella were joined by guitarist Jim Becker and drummer Joe Adamik, exchanging their revolving lineup (previous guests included former Red Red Meat percussionist Brian Deck, Fruit Bats Eric Johnson and Gillian Lisee, and Eleventh Dream Day's Rick Rizzo) for a more static stable of players. Now returning as a four-piece, Heron King Blues reflects the efforts of a tight, cohesive unit, despite the band's admission that most of the songs were improvised (see also Deceleration One and Deceleration Two) or written in the studio.
With Califone's penchant for extemporaneous creation finally being properly indulged, Heron King Blues is an appropriately loose and sprawling record, requiring a bit more patience than some of the band's previous projects. Still, its weight is majestic. Opener "Wingbone" stacks gaping guitar and backroom percussion like bricks, building a spare wall of sad, groaning sounds. Rutili's careful vocal melody is what ultimately carries "Wingbone", his soft, throaty promises somehow both desperate and vacant; when Rutili gently mumbles, "Fill my belly with your whispering," it's obvious that he could be speaking directly to his own songs.
Inching close to eight minutes long, "Sawtooth Sung a Cheater's Song" is near-epic in scope, swinging from dusty country blues to sweeping orchestral laments, while the backwards disco-funk of "Two Sisters Drunk on Each Other" carries along a small army of drum machines, bleating elephant-horns, pump organ, keyboards, loops and squawking guitars. Individually, these songs may flutter from style to style, but each of Heron King's seven (eight counting an uncredited outro) tracks perfectly embody Rutili's increasingly perverse sense of self-discovery.
If you pump Califone through a decent pair of headphones, it's alarmingly easy to synchronize your body to their songs: inhalations become bowed strings, heartbeats mimic steady, muted drums. It's the idea of being over-alive, too tuned in to the blood and gore of the universe. Sweltering and beautiful, Heron King Blues is a triumphant exploration of quiet excess.
