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Calla
TELEVISE
(ARENA ROCK RECORDING COMPANY)

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This Brooklyn-based trio’s third album is a captivating collection of Southern-style art rock that revels in its own deliberation. Each song hints at restraint and unfulfilled climax, but that’s the point — this teasing, almost languishing listen is the sonic equivalent of playing with lights and shadows. On "Monument," muted marching drums drop in and out of the blues-soaked framework, giving the song a dream-like quality. Even songs that should explode into splurges of rock largesse, like the title track, instead proceed in very measured cadences. The tension is alluring, and similar to the calibrated, drawn-out mystery of Sigur Rós.

"As Quick As It Comes/Carrera" sounds like two songs fused together, a slow, whispering confessional that quietly transforms into a cresting dust cloud of guitars and rumbling drums. The band’s Texas roots are revealed in a slight twang and the windswept, tumbleweed ambling of their song structures. Singer Aurelio Valle doesn’t emote so much as he bleeds, slowly and in a sort of drunken waltz that frames his cynical if not fatalistic lyrics, which only add to the album’s ghostly charms.

BY JOSEPH PATEL

Issue Date: January 16 - 23, 2003
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