“Splitter”
Going on four years without a proper album, Arizona-based Calexico is back with Algiers, the band’s sixth full-length. Recorded in New Orleans, the album bares the band’s familiar incarnation of modern-day Americana — but not since 2003’s Feast of Wire has Calexico been so immediately accessible.
Swarms of strings, horns, shakers, and brush-stroked drumbeats all set the scene of desert-dry, Southwestern lamentations. From lonesome highway dweller “Fortune Teller” to the meandering and mesmerizing title track to the grim and gritty “The Vanishing Mind,” Calexico’s hook-riddled doses of lost and lonesome souls have rarely sounded better.