There's no other band like Califone. Ten years ago in this publication, Mark Richardson called them "the perfect sonic evolution for rock," praising their ability to meld the noise prevalent in experimental music with the organic textures of folk as if it were the most natural thing. A decade on, that's still accurate-- Tim Rutili, Ben Massarella, Jim Becker, Joe Adamik, and the various other musicians in Califone's orbit have managed to take their original aesthetic coup and make an incredibly consistent nine-album career out of it. They've been so thoroughly on point on each of their records that earlier this summer, when I happened to be with several fans of the band, no one named the same album as his or her favorite.
That kind of catalog, so reliable but lacking that one standout masterpiece, makes a band easy to take for granted, and there's a temptation to see All My Friends Are Funeral Singers as Another Califone Record. This is especially true on the first few listens, as all those familiar broken textures rush toward you and that one song Tim Rutili has figured out a million ways to write plays again and again. But as you learn the landscape of the album, it becomes clear that Another Califone Record really is a high compliment, and that they can continue to ply the same ground with the same success because that ground is so versatile.
This album is a companion to a feature-length film of the same title, which the band will present and accompany live during a tour next year. Unlike Califone's previous live soundtrack sessions, though, this one is comprised of composed songs, not spontaneous instrumental improv. I can't say how these songs play into Rutili's screenplay, but they stand quite well on their own-- All My Friends follows Roots and Crowns as a cohesive collection that sounds caught between a future of broken machines and a rural past of manual labor. Califone's never been the type of band to write melodies you can sing along with, and this is no exception-- Rutili's soft and ragged singing is, as ever, another repeated element, interlocking with the rough acoustic guitar playing, scraping violin, junkyard percussion, and scouring electronics to create something hypnotic.
"Giving Away the Bride" is one of the most radical deconstructions of normal rock production in the band's catalog, eschewing even their normal roughly recorded acoustic guitars for a spaced-out beat and a monster of a distorted electronic bass figure, over which Rutili floats dreamily, intoning like a blues singer from the 1930s who got lost and tripped into the 21st century. The otherworldliness is so well-developed that it's genuinely startling when the piano drops almost four minutes in or the live drums take up the rhythm a minute after that. If the band had hits, this would be among the greatest.
The rest of the tracklist is something like the band's discography as a whole-- fascinating but hard to boil down to a favorite. The title track harks back a bit to Roomsound highlight "Bottles and Bones (Shades and Sympathy)" with a similarly bright, surging rush, while "Ape-Like" is a stomping hoedown flecked with banjo, fiddle, a sprightly organ theme, and, naturally, a bit of droning feedback. And then the band's odd tribute to Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel alternates front-porch jams and group singing with an unusually straight instrumental rock section that's undercut by a clicking, spluttering electric guitar solo. It's hard to think of any other band that combines such disparate elements so naturally, but it all fits together here.
So yes, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers is just another Califone album, but it's also a reminder of just what a special thing that is. They've carved a place in the rock landscape by discovering a previously ignored way of building a record and perfecting it over time through repetition. In my mind, it puts them in a lineage that includes bands like Talk Talk, Bark Psychosis, and This Heat, not sonically but artistically. If you're already switched on to them, you have to hear this. If you're not, well, what's keeping you? The debate over which Califone record is their best just got even more complicated.
