Califone - Roots & Crowns

Califone's new CD, Roots & Crowns, hit today, and I expect it will further their legacy as one of the most criminally underrated and underappreciated bands in all of indie rock.

This is amazing music, plain and simple. Tim Rutili bends tunes and strings together images and suggestions like no one else. His is a twisted and heartbreaking sort of American music, full of narrow eyed confusion, lumpthroated wanderings, maniacally genius guitarwork, and some of the coolest noise outside of Noise.

This is the blues, but (forgive me) so much better. It's a remaking of American music, drawing on Delta and Chicago blues as well as the finest traditions of punk and noise rock to piece togehter collages that get more beautiful the closer they come to disintegration.

Pink and Sour kicks things off with an appropriate stomp, and the line runs hilly from there. Slow and spooky to raw and rocking, things open up with A Chinese Actor and blow apart again and again. The Orchids is gorgeous and Black Metal Valentine is a masterpiece of restraint.

But what's a track by track account to you? Listen to it.

There's a couple new tracks and a couple great oldies on their MySpace page. For the rest, check emusic, or hit the Record Exchange (or your local independent record store).