Calexico
The Thread That Keeps Us

The new album by Calexico is immediately set to be one of the greatest disappointments of the year 2018. Joey Burns and John Convertino (currently joined by Martin Wenk, Jacob Valenzuela, Sergio Mendoza, Jairo Zavala Ruiz, and Scott Colberg) are two skilled musicians who have previously had very interesting insights into mixing rock-blues music with mariachi and Morricone-inspired soundtracks, but in this specific case, it is clear that after already showing signs of decline, the two have definitively failed. "The Thread That Keeps Us," the new album to be released on ANTI- on the upcoming January 26, is indeed an ugly album or - worse - harmless.

Burns and Convertino reshuffle the deck. For the first time, they do not work on the new album in Arizona but in a large house adapted to a recording studio in Northern California ("the ghost ship") built with debris and reclaimed wood from a shipyard called Panoramic House. Who knows if it was breathing a different air from that of the desert that influenced the sound of this new work (co-produced by the usual Craig Schumacher). Some tracks reveal moments of inspiration, for example in the glimpses of the desert setting like the Morricone-esque "Spinball" or "Shortboard," "Unconditional Waltz," the evocative finale of the country-western ballad "Thrown To The Wild." If we want, we can also consider interesting "Under The Wheels" and "Flores y Tamales," two tracks that revisit typical sounds of "chicha," a musical genre that mixes Andean elements and different tropical genres from samba to salsa, or the mariachi tradition; at the most the Tex-Mex rock-blues of "Voices In The Field" and "Dead In The Water."

But it is truly too little in an album that for the rest is, in all respects, a pop-rock work and which, at best, both in the more rock tracks and in the more acoustic ballads tries to imitate the sound of bands like Wilco with songs that leave the listener absolutely indifferent who in the end will only be able to take this album and throw it out the window. What a pity. But perhaps the limitation in this case lies precisely in the project's foundation, which with its array of proposals has always been inherently limited and destined sooner or later to exhaust itself and in the unfortunate search for different sounds as in this case.