Calexico Garden Ruin Views

• General Goods

Garden Ruin is a wonderful album. I didn't like it much at first, but I kept coming back to it for some reason, and now it's among my favorite releases of the year. Joey Burns is a very underrated singer. It's no accident that Calexico discs always come out in the spring. They simply are the sound to a clear May afternoon.

For the better part of ten years, Calexico has sounded like no other experimental rock outfit. Where else can you hear mariachi singers, marimbas and happy trumpets with shades of highway Americana? Recently reaching the Billboard 200 album chart with their 2005 In the Reins collaboration with Iron &Wine, Calexico

Band leaders John Convertinon and Joey Burns have always played on their interest in southwest culture in their prior releases, but with Garden Ruin, Calexico steers towards the dark indie rock of artists like Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy) Vic Chesnutt and Sam Beam.

What has separated Calexico from so many soundalike alt-country bands over the course of their decade-long career is their commitment to challenging the very idea of genre labels, crafting a signature sound that's at once recognizable as Americana but which never shied from sonic experiments both weird-ass and inspired. To refer to Garden Ruin as Calexico's tightest, most focused album, then, isn't necessarily the compliment it would be for another band. Without any instrumental cuts, a staple of the band's earlier releases for their expert mood-setting effect, and by excising some of the bells-and-whistles

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