Anyone craving a quick schooling in vintage Americana can spin Harry Smith's The Anthology of American Folk Music or Dust to Digital's Goodbye, Babylon, memorize Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, or waddle through In the Shadow of Clinch Mountain, the Bear Family's gorgeous, heart-skewering Carter Family box set. But if you're more interested in hearing ancient mountain and Delta traditions synthesized-- scratched up, muddied, and re-imagined for an America more reliant on machines than the grace of God-- curl up with Califone's Roots and Crowns, the Chicago collective's staggering homage to starts and finishes, computers and cornfields, dirty feet and throbbing foreheads.
Roots and Crowns is Califone's most sophisticated record to date, a natural-- if lighter-- extension of 2004's Heron King Blues, and a coherent aesthetic declaration (which is even more of a triumph considering it was recorded in chunks with new gear, after frontman Tim Rutili packed up for California and the band's instruments were raided during their last tour). This is Califone's climax: Roots and Crowns blurs all lines between the organic and the synthesized, and is as much a product of the gut as the mind, with each perfectly placed skronk-and-twitter hitting its intellectual and emotional targets.
Over the course of eight full-lengths, Califone have proven their prowess for improvisational out-jazz and melodic scrap-folk in equal measure-- Roots and Crowns sees both impulses at play, over some of the band's best-written songs. Longtime engineer (and former Red Red Meat member, and part-time Califone percussionist) Brian Deck orchestrates the loops and squeaks, piecing distinct, synthesized bits into cohesive pictures, and ensuring that the end result still sounds like something your dog dug up in the backyard and spit out, slobber-slicked and gummed, on your front doormat.
Lyrically, Rutili favors tiny, imagistic vignettes over narrative arcs, and these songs read more like prose poems than stories-- which, given the hyper-fragmented sound-collage of Califone's instrumentation, makes a certain kind of sense. In addictive opener "Pink and Sour", Rutilli talks-- twice-- about losing his language over rollicking tribal drums and slide guitar ("Along your skin/ Lost my language," "Cotton in the calm along your side/ Lost my language"), and his bandmates compensate in full, slipping in vivid percussive flourishes that speak remarkably well in his absence. On the whimsical "Spiders House", fellow Chicagoans Bitter Tears lend brassy toots, muted trumpet and trombone sighing, resigned and tired, while Rutili's rusty pipes spew abstract laments: "After the quiet bleeds peel and age familiar/ Peace in the pain." "The Orchids", lifted from former-Throbbing Gristle outfit Psychic TV, is, according to Rutili, the record's inspiration, and is beautifully rendered here-- Rutili' s voice is cottony and vaguely-love-struck, while wisps of harmonica weave in and out of his coos.
Califone have always been stupidly underappreciated, and the further we stumble into the 21st century, the more this music starts to feel both familiar and necessary: Roots and Crowns is bluesy and soulful without reverting to revivalist schtick, and experimental without relying on blind cut-and-pasting. It is old and new, dirty and clean, alienating and accessible, sweet and ugly, organic and industrial, doting and vicious. It is one of the most quintessentially American records imaginable.
