Texas born, New York bred dark-indie merchants Calla are an easy band to like, but this doesn’t feel like it was necessarily a straightforward album to make. You only have to read between the worry lines, hear the dead-weight hitched to and pulled along laboriously by the croaky vocal chords and notice that every strike of any guitar on the album looms ever-more grimly, either perplexed or dismayed, disorientated or anxious. It’s surely a druggy record – it has its peers in that respect – but this doesn’t feel like an addict’s album or a catalogue of rehabilitation and its neuroses. It stops short, it experiments, but it’s not bruised enough for all that. It has an accessible air of, dare we say, college rock to it, but it’s free-flowing and trusting of its own instincts, not to mention being too loaded up to ever be seen as lightweight. It’s a becoming listen.
We’re talking Interpol here, in that the low-lying bass is almost sent out ahead as the scout party, clearing away any debris and turning the contrast down. And The Warlocks, in the fractured, confessional, throaty monologues, The Dandy Warhols in their lie on their backs and soak it up delirium. And then Black Rebel Motorcycle Club in their original guise as faithful disciples to the leather-coated family tree that took root in the Velvet Underground’s clearly-marked plot, sights firmly set on successions of scuffed, passive crescendos. It’s an intoxicating brew that doesn’t attempt to rip up its roots, but rather stare at the same sky and make new scary pictures out of the clouds.
The single and album opener ‘It Dawned On Me’ is the sort of blissful druggy pop with air-bubbles that the Dandy Warhols churn out effortlessly, minus the eccentrics that really aren’t transferable. And it’s that which sustains the album and makes it so reliable, if a little safe. ‘Pulvarized’ however, which begins a little like Portishead and flourishes into a tender Death Cab For Cutie graze at dusk, ‘Swagger’, like Iggy Pop fronting the Breeders at BRMC’s speed, and ‘Overshadowed’ which cajoles itself towards a bright-lights climax and a riff that Jason Pierce or Grasshopper might be proud of, are notable exceptions. Even if it’s more bumps than collisions though, it’s a strong album that might just leave some minor bruising.