Calexico: Hot Rail : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Prickly-pear melodies, burbling mariachi horns, blow-pop marimba chords, Western-sunset guitars and, in the distance, the cry of a train whistle -- such is the ambience of a Calexico tune. Singer-guitarist Joey Burns and drummer John Convertino used to be in a lounge group called Friends of Dean Martinez, and they still are in the Arizona art-rock outfit Giant Sand; that pedigree, as well as Calexico's gorgeously downcast sound, put them in the company of ass-backward Americanists like Wilco and the Dirty Three. Hot Rail is a lazy, dissolving dream of a record that glimmers in and out like a mirage and sharpens to a hard focus with songs like "Sonic Wind," whose wind-chime melody and cosmic Western imagery suggest Cormac McCarthy with a beat-up acoustic guitar. Most rock music is about teen culture or boobies, not literature or art. But Calexico -- especially in "Service and Repair," when Burns sings, "In the shadows of chain-store ghost towns, where no one walks the streets at night" -- conjure a phantom photograph of the American West, overgrown with cactus and the unemployed. (RS 843)

PAT BLASHILL