Conflicting Calexico

What happens when the deluxe edition of your favorite band’s album has a EP of material superior to the main album? I face that conundrum with Calexico’s The Thread That Keeps Us. Like the album as I may in places, it doesn’t always have that Calexico sound.

The End of the World with You has traces of David Bowie’s Heroes and U2’s With or Without You while still sounding somewhat like the band. Voices in the Field is vintage Calexico, with its Mexican beat almost taking a military cadence at times, tackling issues of the borderlands with intimate knowledge and clarity. Unconditional Waltz has the mournful horns, but mirrors the melody of Simon and Garfunkel’s America. As an instrumental, I give it a pass.

The number of rock tracks that don’t break out bog down the record. The Town and Miss Lorraine strays into the straight-ahead indie-rock. The songs aren’t bad but nothing stamps Calexico upon them. Girl in the Forest, Bridge to Nowhere and more tread a landscape too embedded in indie rock (whatever that means anymore).

The band sometimes settles into a template for its albums – big bold intro song followed by a more tradition Latin-tinged song, and so on. I won’t call it a groove or a rut, because the musicianship has not lagged. These guys are professionals, and every track is still tight. But the sound collage has shifted. I don’t begrudge a band an attempt to freshen it sounds – I felt Calexico achieved that on Edge of the Sun.

The problem for the band lies in its debt to a sound and place. If you take too much Southwest out of Calexico, they risk becoming a different band. I don't think they have reached that point due to seven unexpected songs not on the main record. 

Stick with the bottom seven.

Fortunately for the die-hard fan, the record has a second act, a deluxe album packed with a second record sporting seven songs – three are instrumentals. These bonus songs form a cohesive whole akin to the many excellent tour albums Calexico assembled in the past two decades. Edge of the Sun similarly came with a bonus album, but it lacks the connective tissue of Thread’s extra tracks (a collaboration with Eric Burdon simply falls flat).

The one-two punch of Longboard and Luna Roja throttles me back to the band’s earliest tour albums, when they could express a range of moods on a few dusty instrumentals. It hearkens back to 98-99 Road Map, a 28-minute immersion in the Southwest.

That’s the test a Calexico album must pass for me. Can you picture yourself blasting this album while driving across the Southwest, hours from a city of any size, windows down, the landscape your only company? I could imagine that scenario with extra tracks, and hope to test the theory sometime this year.

Maybe the album will sound better live. Check back with me in May when I’ve still not worn out the bonus tracks.