CALEXICO
Feast of wire
CD/LP, City Slang
Just
like Massive
Attacks “100th window” this album was also eagerly
awaited by a lot of people, but unlike Massive
Attacks Calexico rise up to the expectations in every minute.
Maybe this is because Calexico are right on top of their hype at the moment
and didn’t take five years time-out to return with a new album. But even
then, their mix of country-music, Tex Mex, folk and singer/songwriter, with
an unique jangly beat is timeless to say the least. They have their very own
mixture that is both satisfying and disappointing expectations and
prejudices about them (check out the skater-girl on the front-cover and the
dead(?) man on the back-cover, now how does she fit into the whole Country /
Tex-Mex-chili, I ask you?), and we didn’t expect anything less. Which
makes “Feast of Wire” a perfect record, really.
Yesterday
we watched an old movie with Johnny Depp (I love Johnny Depp, he is the
coolest, cutest actor I know and he is a very good actor on top of that, who
only plays in movies he wants to play in. If I ever see him play in
something like “Mission Impossible” I’ll tore my posters from the wall
and burn them…) and Marlon Brando called “The Brave”, where Johnny
Depp plays an unemployed Indian who lives with his Mexican wife and two kids
in a slum near a big trash-site. To provide for his family he agrees to be
tortured to death by some strange business-types. At the same time a new
company plans to tear down all the slums leaving all the people shelter- and
homeless. The movie is all about the week before he walks into town to his
miserable fate. It is actually a great movie, nothing like you’d expect to
come from the US. Maybe if you liked “Lone Star” with Kris
Kristofferson, this one is for you.
Well,
somewhere in-between there is a strange fiesta, where Johnny Depp bought all
kinds of stuff with the money he got upfront for his “new job”, mainly a
playground for children, swimming pools and so on. There are all sorts of
misfits and outcasts, Indians and Mexicans, a strange French dude in a torn
smoking, a priest, and Iggy Pop gnawing on a giant ham’s leg. And some
people are playing a mixture of Mexican music and avantgarde-stuff on two
guitars. Everybody is drunk and dancing and not caring that world is going
to end the next day. It is an almost surreal mixture of medieval market,
post-apocalyptic drunken craziness and Mexican / Indian – drug-feast. I
imagine that Calexico could play on that fiesta as well. The have the
drunken waltzes and jangly country-tunes, the crazy latina-instrumentals, as
well as the slow ballads with eerie tones that would perfectly end the
fiesta and then also the instrumental interludes that would fit the grizzly
cold night before the world ends.
