Don Caballero
What Burns Never Returns

Let's go back ten years. Let's forget the last (tremendously manneristic) “Punkgasm”. It's 1998, post-Slint, Touch and Go Records. We're talking about the real Don Caballero line-up. We're talking about the founders Damon Che (drums), Mike Banfield (guitar), Pat Morris (bass) and the '92 entry, fundamental in determining the future anatomy of the band, Ian Williams (guitar). We're talking about “What Burns Never Returns”.

This, a unique and immense theorem whose corollaries are the stylistic features of today's post-rock. An important note is Ian's formation, a year earlier, of the side-project Storm and Stress: if the Don Caballero of previous works assaulted space, creating a perfect, absolute geometry, filling it with Fripp-like phrasing (explicitly drawing from the Crimsonian lesson), making it explode with preciousness, apocalyptic distortions, empirical experiments, jazz-like erudition, these empty it (and here the Storm and Stress influence is felt), they instinctively adjust the proportions, rarefying the dimensions of space, letting the sound fabric breathe.

“Don Caballero 3” opens the album: the understanding between Damon and Ian is cerebral, intense, and the guitar riffs (almost metal) become nuances, light, infinitely looped, exaggerated, accompanied (if the work of his majesty Che on the drums can be reduced to "accompaniment") by counter-tempos and syncopations of a drum as incisive and determinant in the dialogue as ever. And it's a mutual, spontaneous, and tacit evolution: the guitars become the carpet and Che sublimates in emblematic virtuosity. And then comes “Delivering Groceries at 138 Beats per Minute”: a mocking guitar, capricious in its syncopation, granite-like. An absolute contamination of free-jazz, avant-garde, heavy metal is achieved; one even finds post-hardcore gems of a Fugazi-like mold.

The emblematic “Slice Where You Live Like Pie” consists of a wild noise carpet, where hyperbolic solos are constrained in spatial cages, where they scream as they die. And it's this rediscovered freedom, this calculated naivety in the instinct of the moment that becomes the theme of the entire album. Hence forms one of those stylistic milestones of an entire generation, which then caused the natural decline of the group.

A visionary, truly avant-garde (if not prophetic) manifesto, which proves to be a perfect approach to the Don Caballero universe.