All My Friends Are Funeral Singers

There's no other band like Califone. Ten years ago in this publication, Mark Richardson called them "the perfect sonic evolution for rock," praising their ability to meld the noise prevalent in experimental music with the organic textures of folk as if it were the most natural thing. A decade on, that's still accurate-- Tim Rutili, Ben Massarella, Jim Becker, Joe Adamik, and the various other musicians in Califone's orbit have managed to take their original aesthetic coup and make an incredibly consistent nine-album career out of it. They've been so thoroughly on point on each of their records that earlier this summer, when I happened to be with several fans of the band, no one named the same album as his or her favorite.

Reviewing a band which you know almost nothing about is not the insurmountable challenge it used to be. The internet has changed all that. Gone are the days of piles of labelled promo records: today, I might receive the new Califone album as a digital download via email, after which I immediately turned my eyes to the world wide web in order to learn a little bit about the band that Red Red Meat had become.