Calla -- Classic or Dud?

And the start was in Texas, singer Aurelio Valle and drummer Wayne Magruder playing together in the Factory Press, a band that desperately wanted to be Gun Club. Aurelio didn't sing yet; he just banged out punkabilly licks on his hollow-body and looked pretty. Soon thereafter Valle, Magruder and friend Sean Donovan moved to Fort Greene in Brooklyn. Donovan's an avante-composer (he apprenticed with one of the giants of the genre for a fair amount of time before quitting, disgusted by the man) and the most serious guy in the band (he wrote a musical piece interpreting Kafka's diary entries at one point -- he performed it at Carnegie Hall).

So Valle and Magruder coming from a rock background and Donovan coming from an anti-rock background led to their first album, titled Calla (it's now out of print, but Ryko's gonna reissue it with Arena Rock later this year). It's their best work. Machinery crunches, metallic scratches and squeals and all sorts of programmed hubbub dominate the album, but hovering just above all of this is a stark Western guitar -- Ennio Morricone with tight jeans and a good haircut. Valle can't sing for shit yet, so instead he whispers and murmers and generally just tries to be atmosphere and not do too much to draw attention to himself. And that holds true for the band as a whole. No one does much to assert himself, so the whole thing tenuously coexists -- no one stepping on each other's toes, but in a Sinkah-esque switch, that conscious timidity increases the interplay between the elements tenfold. So in "Tarantula" the sampled caws of some imagined bird echo across the glacial beat and the guitar slices through loud and biting -- but not nearly as forceful as it should be. It's the sound of nervous glances from one musician to the other. Feeling each other out. The whole album is a nebulous mess. From measure to measure you aren't certain where it's going, but you are certain that the band doesn't have much of a clue either. Which is great, of course.

Scavengers, recorded after the band was settled in New York, is a nostalgic disc. Wistful for their own past, the album's atmosphere is dominated by the arid Texas landscape -- it's sometimes (really slow) rockabilly, sometimes folk, sometimes post punk, but it's always delivered with a dry resolve. "Fear of Fireflies" (most Calla fans' favorite song) is rural in tone and lyrical content. Best of all is "Love of Ivah" (a play on Gun Club's "For the Love of Ivy"), a two-part funeral dirge. Reverberating guitars, thick bass and a guarded vocal from Aurelio. Halfway through it changes from a painful rumination to a hopeful weep. The guitar starts a circular riff like a reoccurring memory that it can't shake. Aurelio sings "Oh my my/ I went/ I don't why/ I hear them every second of my life/ Oh my my/ I hope I never see you in another life/ I just might/ Try seeking shelter underneath my skin/ If you like/ Try telling someone with a simple grin/ 'I don't know why/ I hear them ever second of my life'/ Oh my my/ I hope I never see you in another life." And it circles back on itself again and again. He's in a loop that he can't escape, and the music steadily builds in an attempt to escape the misfortune, but it never happens. So it just gets more and more mournful, finally giving up with an ugly guitar note. The album ends with a cover of U2's "Promenade" played pretty straight. It's vulnerable and tender and scared and lost. It's an unnerving finale. No resolution, and it seems as if the search for any sort of denouement has been rendered hopeless.

It seems that most bands these days are afraid of playing covers. Afraid to treat other artist's material as superior to their own. Afraid of deconstructing canonized work. For a band that writes original material, playing covers has become a significant risk (I blame this on the Beatles, actually, who signified to the rock world that true genius lies in self-composition, not interpretation. Which is hogwash. Maybe the best way for a band to show itself is to play someone else's material. It's there that the full aesthetics and goals can be fully realized, because they aren't hindered by their own limits, hang-ups and prejudices.) Calla plays a lot of covers. "Promenade" on Scavengers, a (uncredited) Leonard Cohen riff loops on the self-titled album, a cover of Can's "Mother Sky" on the split with the Walkmen, Dylan's "I Shall Be Released" and Steve Miller's "Dear Mary" on the remix album, Custom. Live they play all of these regularly (and they've turned "Mother Sky" into a mini-medley, as "Mushroomhead" has now become a fixture at the finale), as well as George Harrison's "Long Long Long," Neil Young's "Harvest Moon" and Springsteen's "State Trooper." With the exception of "Mother Sky," which they turn into sheer sex, each of these covers becomes much more vulnerable the way Calla plays them.

The remix album might rival Calla as the band's strongest work. Basically because the collaborators (I-sound, tarwater, metrotech, detach, couch, pan American and dan matz) seem to understand the band's strengths even more than Calla does. The songs are drawn out so thin that they snap and recoil, mutating into different forms that stand superior to their original versions. And hearing their songs reworked this way completely changed the way Calla viewed their own material, I think. These days, when Calla revisits songs from the first two records (aside from "Fear of Fireflies"), they effectively deconstruct each tune. So one of the industrial crunches from the first album becomes molded with "Love of Ivah," as the conveyer belt precision of noise and drone eases back to the stark minimalism of "Ivah"'s second half. Or a guitar lick from the Tom Waitsian "Tijerina" gets looped over another cut. I can't think of any rock bands who do this any more -- sure, some will perform medleys of their older hits (mainly soul artists), but none so gleefully rip apart their own work in search of new sounds. It's an amazing feat, and they do it beautifully.

All of which leads to Televise, which is easily their weakest album. As my Voice review of the album said, Calla finally picked a side on the country-city (read: acoustic-electronic) fence, and it's in another field altogether. Because Televise is a rock album. The slower numbers that make up the album's gluttonous middle don't stand out from one another because Calla treats its own material with a deep respect, a mistake they hadn't made before. So they're played pretty much straight, which means no contradictions or dialogues or negotiations allowed. I think the reason for this change in mindset was a desire for attention -- it can't be easy completely escaping notice when you're arguably the best band in the world's biggest music city. And the bid has largely worked as the press has been pretty strong and most of all there HAS been press, something that they couldn't say before. It has some good songs, but none as interesting as their older work.

I wrote a piece about Calla for Spin two years ago that the mag declined to run (the section's editor told me that Calla "wasn't ready for Spin yet"). In it I drew a comparison between Calla and Sun Records -- the way both of them have made/make conscious attempts to collapse/combine disparate sounds and styles and ethos in a bid to, if not make something new, then at least make something exciting. Musically, Calla's evolution isn't nearly as monumental as Sun's (and I'm not even getting into popularity or impact here cuz that argument's already been made, obviously), but that doesn't make it any less worthwhile. And it makes it just as timely. If the suburbs are a negotiation between city and country, then Calla would be a perfect suburban band -- even moreso than band's typically lauded for this accomplishment like the Mekons, X or Uncle Tupelo. Because Calla avoid the tropes of both urban and rural music, while strongly evoking both. Maybe this is why they've escaped notice and why so many people here dislike them so strongly -- the band's reluctance to join a side. This is their greatest asset and it will be their downfall. We all know the Lord doesn't like it when we're lukewarm.

They leave me a little bit cold, and I can never get all the way through an album.

My little bro' would love em though! (That's not meant to be a diss, btw! :))

(i got yr discs last week. i'm gonna email you later today or tomorrow, should i have time)

i read through most of that. thanks. if i see the above, I'll pick it up.

So keep spreading the word Yanc3y (you're doing a good job), and thanks for pointing out the remix album. will try to pick it up somewhere.

1. "The Living Ice-Age" (this is by tenEcke, the solo project of Calla's drummer Wayne Magruder. But both Sean and Aurelio play on it, and it really captures what I like best about Calla)
2. "Tarantula" (from Calla)
3. "Trinidad/I Shall Be Released" (live)(this is from the new "Televised" single, but I think I might use the version from Custom, as it's better)
4. "Televised" (radio edit)(from Televise)
5. "Tijerina" (from Scavengers)
6. "Only Drowning Men" (from Calla)
7. "Love of Ivah" (from Scavengers)
8. "Long Long Long" (live)(This was recorded at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC two days after George Harrison died. I was at this show. It's on the Insound Tour Support comp)
9. "Astral" (demo version)(this is much better than the version that appears on Televise)
10. "Strangler" (from Televise)
11. "Fear of Fireflies" (from Scavengers)
12. "Custom Car Crash" (from Calla)
13. "Slum Creeper" (from Scavengers)
14. "Awake and Under" (from Calla)

A lot of these songs I'll replace with the remix versions. I might throw a few more demos that I have on there as well, plus the "Mother Sky" cover. If anyone wants a copy of this once it's done, lemme know. I'm going to work on this more, because I want to arrange the tracks so that you'll hear all of these underlying elements that I detailed in my monster post. I hate the idea of putting things in context, but I really want to be able to convey the excitement that I get from the band...

My grocery list to follow later today.

1. "The Living Ice-Age" (this is by tenEcke, the solo project of Calla's drummer Wayne Magruder. But both Sean and Aurelio play on it, and it really captures what I like best about Calla)
2. "Tarantula" (from Calla)
3. "Trinidad/I Shall Be Released" (live)(I've switched to the version from the Remix record cuz it's drawn out longer)
4. "Televised" (radio edit)(from Televise)
5. "Only Drowning Men" (from Calla)
6. "Slum [I-Sound King of Everything Mix]" (a remix of "Slum Creeper" from the Remix album. Gorgeous and creepy and wonderful)
7. "Astral" (demo version)(this is much better than the version that appears on Televise)
8. "Long Long Long" (live)(This was recorded at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC two days after George Harrison died. I was at this show. It's on the Insound Tour Support comp)
9. "Fear of Fireflies" (from Scavengers)
10. "Tijerina" (from Scavengers)
11. "Love of Ivah" (from Scavengers)
12. "Strangler" (from Televise)
13. "Dear Mary/Subterrain [Dan Matz mix]" (from the Remix album. The first part of the song is a Steve Miller cover)
14. "Awake and Under" (from Calla)

I still have a bit of space left, so I might try to fit one more track on there, but that's it as of now...

here's the playlist anyway.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/playlists/2003aprjun/mixingit0319.shtml

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3_aod.shtml?mixingit

thanks, julio!

I've only heard Calla, but I'm in Yanc3y's corner already. Here are some thoughts I had on it while caught in its grip:

I haven't seen much written about the band, but I know that they're transplanted Texans living in New York, and I understand that their music reflects the tension between those disparate landscapes. That's all clear. That and the Morricone soundtrack over a David Lynch movie featuring a cameo from Tom Waits impersonating Nick Cave. Well, okay, I don't know if anyone else has said that, but it's difficult to get a foothold here. Perhaps that's the point; pop culture footholds and musical reference points are superfluous, just attempts to fill spaces that cannot be filled. The music is everything.

With the opening bone-dry howl of "Tarantula", the thirsty tambourine pony trot, the languid coyote song of the guitar, as it builds and wends and falls away, a serpent death rattle dragging its emptiness behind it, the song is kind of ominous (and yet more organic Texas than New York). "Custom Car Crash" is what invited the Waits comparison, which is too easy, since way more is going on here between the lines, the layers. The vocals are plain creepy with this band, those barely whispered sounds. "June" plays with rhythm in a completely different way, but what I love is the sparking electrical fizzing, the nod to urban technology which could also be bugs on a porch getting zapped, so it's both. For the first time. Empty heat. The desert, a dry organic sweltering place, but the curious emptiness of a large city flagging under a humid summer day, enervated, panting like a half mad dog.

This music scares me, at various points, sometimes at different points on different spins. It seems to tap into feelings I never knew existed.

On "Only Drowning Men", that repeated beat could be hammers-on-wood, or marching boots. And the spaces between all the sounds are incredibly huge (as on most of their songs here), vast as the dark sparkling bowl of sky over the desert's nighttime. Each plucked reverbed string is like a star shimmering. Nothing moves fast here. Bones reflect the moon's white. Melodies take an age to come clear out of the night, emerging like spectral hoodoos. More than once, when voices intrude, they're startling, unexpected. This music sounds like instrumental music, and the hushed near-spoken words spook you when they arrive suddenly at ear height. (The Leonard Cohen sample is driving me crazy -- which song is that from? It's an inexplicably sad sound).

"Elsewhere" is barely there. The hunting horn/passing ship sound like something from a bygone age. Lethargy, ennui, follows. Something squeaky like a weather vane, something hanging from a rusted fence. That heartbreaking guitar sound like the distillation of all frontier Western myth. Then the hair-raising goosebump feedback shrieks like cougars fucking (honest). I still hear more country than town, though, unless the throbbing pulse at the heart is more electric grid than the pulsating flanks of a sick, hounded beast.

"Truth About Robots" is astonishing. The melodic theme reminds me of Cat Power's John Lee Hooker cover on You Are Free ("Crawlin' Black Spider", which would be apt after we've already had a song called "Tarantula"). It doesn't sound a lot like the blues, and yet, in essence, it does. The creepy melancholy of this repeated refrain assaulted by shrieks and howls of guitar feedback is like the unraveling of the secret unpalatable truth at the core of our dissolute urban nightmares. There is both fear and an infinite sadness in steel.

"Trinidad" is plain lulling, like something deadly and mesmerizing. You know that nothing good will come of following its lazy meanders, but you go anyway. Sure enough "Keyes" continues the charade, easing us in softly only to swing the club of its industrial rhythm at our heads. There's that sick Eraserhead feeling again, and the dentist drill whines that come in after a couple of minutes of this busy industry (the workers are faceless) don't help. They almost hurt. Then something breaks like glass or steel, and it's gone. Just gone.

"Awake and Under" is the bad dream that tricks you into thinking you've woken, over and over, a cruel lucid nightmare ("short waves and chemicals," "she walks on water / so tell her father / she's a miracle"). The singer has some bad shit on his mind, something awful, some dangerous love or even more dangerous hate. The guitar chord at the end, hesitant, gorgeous, backed by some kind of treated, processed keyboard sound (another guitar?) is the moment before the terrible deed. The entire album is perhaps the moment before this unspoken occurence, some product of a sidewinder brain baked at noon and dragged half mad into the sweltering hidden alleyways of the city. A sacrifice needing to be made.

Moving in the rain and then discovering that my new flat hadn't been cleaned or painted and the carpet smells like dog was almost completely made up for by finding a Calla cd from someone I don't even know in the mailbox. Rock.

D-BLOG

9:54 PM -- WOKE UP, TURNED ON TV

10:11 -- TELEMUNDO MASTURBATION

10:30 -- WATCHED COSBY EPISODE WHERE THEO AND COCKROACH GET CAUGHT CHEATING ON THEIR MATH QUIZ AND MUST HIDE FROM COSBY

10:49 -- ATE BREAKFAST

11:55 -- CALLED JANET (BUSY SIGNAL)

12:05 -- CHECKED ILM, MORE CALUM BULLSHIT

12:30 -- POSTED OWN PICTURE TO THREAD

Calla will be opening for the Cure on a Euro tour later this year!

(...not that CTC were bad -- in fact, they won me over a bit, live at least...)

A short set, no encore, but they were still completely mesmerizing, absolutely absorbing. I'll be writing it up for PopMatters so I won't shoot my wad here, but everything positive said about them on this great thread is true. They are very nice guys, and there isn't a NYC band who can touch them, which may indeed be their downfall. These albums will be resurrected one day by future alien cultural anthropologists, and someone will declare them planetary -- if not galactic -- treasures, who knows?

(Oh, a sad footnote -- the Cure thing looks like it fell through.)

and nick, i am still sending it out. email me if you want one.

the only time I saw them they were unfortunately opening for the HORRIBLE Longwave. not many people there to see them either.

any tour only items on the merch table? was there a merch table?

it is?

i contact arena a few weeks ago enquiring re releases for us uk'ers, and the response was as vague as i have come to expect from industry.

shame as i loved their stuff that i heard - except the carlsonics, that sucked

wasn't aware that calla are now on beggars .. ta .. will enquire.

But...

Losing Sean Donovan was disastrous.

Something else about them has changed, something elusive. I talked with Wayne Magruder at that same Media Club (Vancouver) show mentioned upthread, and compared with even a year ago (they played Vancouver's Dicks on Dicks), he seemed more cowed and defeatist, which is too bad. Back then, he was engaged and generous.

To cap it all, a friend, who I'd gotten tix for (in an ultimately futile bid to transmit the Callavirus), said afterward: "They were pretty emo, eh?"

Ah, fuck. I wish I could do more to let others know how emotionally fucking plangent this band can be.

I really hope people pick up on them... They're so great

Got Scavengers out of the dollar bin and I really like it. Bands that exercise restraint really well are winners.

what happened to these guys?
I only have 'Scavengers'. I always mistake them for Califone.

I don't know, but I haven't listened to that album too often since I posted about it 2 years ago. Nothing against it though.

iirc they got boring

still got some time for the first album, though, it's got that summer night moodiness to it

Couple of them have solo projects out, but when I last looked they raised enough money to go back in the studio to record. There's some soundcloud links, etc. on their Facebook page.

first two albums were classic, after that, eh...

shoulda contended imo

New song!
https://callamusic.bandcamp.com/track/pick-your-battles