Calexico - Carried to Dust

Very rarely have I come across a CD so evocative of time and place as Calexico's stunningly gorgeous offering, Carried to Dust.

Named for a border town along the California/Mexico line, Calexico's music is as vast and expansive as the chaparral desert. Haunting and desolate, Calexico, the city, is a lost strip of population, 120 miles east of San Diego, 70 miles west of Yuma, Arizona and officially lost in the middle of nowhere. Straddling the border with it's sister city, Mexicali, Calexico is a place where the stars shine down at night with the ferocity of a million watching angels. A place where the desert horizon never seems to reach the end of its line.

Both the Pope and I are intimately familiar with the interior desert of southern California. Years ago, I used to volunteer at a clinic in Tecate, Mexico and twice a month I'd make the two hour drive through the chaparral; rattlesnakes and jack rabbits darting out my path as the Mexican border came closer. Sounds echoed simply from the vastness around me, until they eventually faded away and died, like the sun-bleached, skeletonized remains of a deer that wandered too far away from water. Scorpions ducked under rocks for shade and the loneliness of being without company in the midst of such desolation was so intense it'd reverberate in my bones.

And Calexico takes you there.

more . . . http://ripplemusic.blogspot.com/2008/11/calexico-carried-to-dust.html