Quicksand: Cradlesnakes
Dustbowl country, haunting percussion improvisations, and rugged rock & roll are roughly hammered together on the fourth album from Califone. Salvaged from the ashes of Drag City’s supremely haunting blues travellersRed Red Meat, this shape-shifting group--built around the core duo of Ben Massarella and Tim Rutili--is a hard to pin down. "Your Golden Ass" is an inelegant, leathery garage drone that sounds like the Modern Lovers collectively overdosing in an alley on the Lower East Side. "Horoscopic Amputation Honey" rolls mandolin, cello, and sparse electronics into an offbeat, yet oddly hymnal campfire sing-along, while "Cat Eats Coyote" is an on-the-spot foray into junkyard percussion and ghostly sax. All these stylistic skips mean thatQuicksand/Cradlesnakesfeels like a contradictory mix of city savvy and rural roughness, extravagant technology and salvage-store poverty. Anyone that felt Wilco’sYankee Hotel Foxtrotor Calexico’sFeast of Wireshould have been more experimental will be well-served by this exploration of marginal Americana.--Louis Pattison