I’ve enjoyed Calexico for about 3… maybe 4 years now. I love their sultry, indie, mexicali style of music that blends styles and cultures seamlessly. Their blending of a clean indie rock style with brass, strings, and a soulfully twangy steel guitar is a sound I love and, to me, culminated in their amazing orchestra album, Spiritoso (which I HIGHLY recommend you check out). Also, being a gringo who speaks horribly broken spanish I get excited when I can pick out words and phrases I understand, but that’s likely an enjoyment all my own.
Edge of The Sun is Calexico’s 4th album and one thing that has stayed consistent with them is the growing complexity and aural diversity found in their albums and after the first few seconds of song one, “Falling from the Sky,” I got nervous. I didn’t want to give Calexico a bad review, but what the hell was going on? It’s poppy and bright; I can imagine Joey Burns standing in the middle of a field of daffodils dressed in white with his band behind him, also dressed in white, singing to the sky. This isn’t the smooth rolling baby-makin’ music of albums past.
It’s not that I don’t like dancy poppy fun music at times, but this was such a crazy departure from the topless-cadillac-on-a-moon-lit-road style I was listening to yesterday. Then song two “Bullets & Rocks” hit and my grin became bigger and bigger as the album continued.
Brass, strings, banjos, steel guitar, acoustic guitar, harmonica, drums, and baby-makin’ rhythms emerged, but with a bit more south-west soul to them than has really been in albums past… and I like it. It’s as if the ghost of country music past hooked up with the Boxer Rebellion, a mariachi band, and Desperado Antoinio Banderas and Edge of The Sun was the result. This album is everything I was hoping for from the band.
There is a nice evolution of Calexico’s sound and they haven’t lost any of the brilliant storytelling and soulful delivery I’ve come to expect from Calexico. It scratches an itch I didn’t even know I had and it feels so good. More than once I’ve woken up in the morning humming bars from “Tapping on the Line” or “Bullets & Rocks” and have started singing the chorus of “Miles from the Sea” in the shower.
Edge of The Sun is a great album and I recommend giving it a try. Like all of Calexico’s albums it’s fun, layered, complex, moody, sultry, diverse, and interesting. A great listen no matter what time of day (or night).