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Calla
If you're still recovering from addiction to twee pop or what Little Miss Rock'n'Roll referred to as "gloomy progcountryemo," Calla probably aren't the best starting point for rediscovering what guitar can do when stretched to the limit. Even with training wheels and the ultimate accessibility of their new album Collisions, Calla's uncomfortable melding of spaghetti-western landscape meditations with Eno's glamtastic guitar trickery doesn't make for easy listening.
Though Calla have been name-checked and championed by artists as diverse as Sigur Rós and Chan Marshall and have toured with both Interpol and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, large-scale success has eluded them, even after four critically acclaimed albums. Perhaps driving with the lights off and only the moon reflecting on coliche isn't a route everyone is comfortable with, but Calla's rhythms so eerily match the shapes and textures of the flat expanses of South Texas that the trip down a dark road is inevitable, so the possibility is avoided altogether -- which is a tragedy. Hope remains that Calla's recent signing with Beggars Banquet will remedy a bit of the obscurity and shed warmer light on what three boys from Texas have been creating in Brooklyn for the past eleven years.
Last year at SXSW was the first time I was able to catch Calla live (due in part to my being perpetually ten minutes late...and in the case of some show nights, longer). Never before had any live performance so lived up to my expectations or the transcendent potential of recordings that had already made themselves at home in my life. I stood near the low stage at the Ritz and watched a pure experience stripped bare of banter or antics, a standard that Calla continue to deliver in regular tour sets. They were four then, but slimmed down to a three piece, the edge of extraordinary racket has honed, making Calla more than worthy to cover Eno's "Needles in the Camel's Eye," which they've seized and made their own to round out encores on the Collisions tour.
What the next tour and Calla's second SXSW appearance in as many years will bring for them is yet to be seen, but if the attention of 2005 is an indicator, there may be bigger plans and paths yet to unfold for this band whose very history is Texas scene legend turned fairytale of New York.
Calla - Awake and Under
Calla - Custom Car Crash (live)
Calla - Astral
Calla - Pete the Killer
Calla - Overshadowed
Calla's official site. Buy Calla's newest album, Collisions, and others from their back catalog Amazon or the iTunes music store.
Posted by Last Girl to the Party at 01.23.06 at 1:33 AM
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