Album Review // Califone // The Villager's Companion

Jealous Butcher Records

5/5 stars

Sometimes coffee is just coffee. If fortunate, it's a damn fine cup to savor with eyes closed — no searching for words. Many genres are thrown at walls trying to define Tim Rutili's Califone. Time wasted categorizing is better spent listening. Red, Red Meat fans have been watching Rutili unfold like a time-elapsed film of flowers blooming. This album contains ghosts of collected sounds, instinctive as a simple folk song or deliberate as industrial discord. There is lifting orchestration competing with the drone of a box fan. This is twilight music. As the sun departs leaving vibrant hues with bright stars splattering across the sky, all we see are silhouettes in elaborate shadow plays. Rutili looks into the abyss and comes back to report upon the rich beauty of the overlooked, the forgotten, and the mundane. His vocals are deceptively gentle in the delivery of complex lyrics. He gives directions via twisting roads which inevitably leave one lost in verdant Lovecraftian forests. Each musician in Califone becomes a part of the mighty river carrying Rutili's raft smoothly towards the rapids. Every track is engaging, although there are favorites like: "Bullet b4 the Sound," "Gas Station Roller Doggs," "Every Amnesia Movie", "Jaco Pastorius," and "Burn the Sheets, Bleach the Books."