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 travellers Red 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 that Quicksand/Cradlesnakes feels like a contradictory mix of city savvy and rural roughness, extravagant technology and salvage-store poverty. Anyone that felt Wilco€s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot or Calexico€s Feast of Wire should have been more experimental will be well-served by this exploration of marginal Americana. --Louis Pattison