Track Listing

1. Pink And Sour
2. Spider's House
3. Sunday Noises
4. Eye You Lost In The Crusades
5. Chinese Actor
6. Alice Crawley
7. Orchids
8. Burned By The Christians
9. Black Metal Valentine
10. Rose Petal Ear
11. 3 Legged Animals
12. If You Would

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66569 in Music
• Released on: 2006-10-09
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Import
• Dimensions: .15 pounds

CD Description
With ROOTS AND CROWNS--their best record to date--Ben Massarella and Tim Rutili's run with Califone has become as long and accomplished as their tenure with their previous outfit,Red Red Meat. ROOTS AND CROWNS perfects Califone's recipe of combining roots sounds and instruments with post-rock cinematic textures, and establishes the band as a sort of alternate Wilco, another Chicago-based outfit with one foot in Americana and the other in exploration.
Whereas Wilco's songs lean toward the former, Rutili and Co. avidly embrace the latter despite the traditionalist underpinnings. Strummed acoustic guitars and lullaby harmonies intermingle with percolating loops throughout ROOTS AND CROWNS, particularly on standouts like "Spider's House" and "The Orchids", a Psychic TVcover. While at times slightly monochromatic, the album succeeds on Rutili's appetite for oddball sonics and the band'sability to make the experimental sound easy.

Customer Reviews

Metal Burned Sees Ghosts Crusade Spider Sour
This is one of those albums, which seem to defy classification and that in itself makes it something which should be in every music fan's collection. Taking ideas and genres from all corners of the music spectrum to make something, which is genuinely fascinating and satisfying to listen to. Beautifully crafted, down right quirky, it flutters from gentle folksie ambience to hypnotic grind in the blink of an eye. And it does it all effortlessly and without self-indulgence. Intelligent without being overbearing and pretentious, it's full of surprises and joy, even after the umpteenth listen.

At the same time they seem to take a child like delight in the noises they make, and that brings with it a freshness and clarity not often heard; intense, laid-back, ramshackle yet perfectly constructed, scratchy, funky, bluesy, whimsical, gossamer threaded events that scamper delightfully from gentle, almost casual tunes to whirling dervish steel cored grunt and back again, without even breaking into a sweat. Brilliant.