Calexico
Hot Rail (2000)

review by: Matthew Scrivner
Date: 7/5/01

In the Sonoran desert that stretches from southern Arizona south to Mexican wastelands, the wind spits red dust and tumbleweeds across scalding dirt trails. A gunslinger straight from the nightmares of Sergio Leone pulls his colt .45 and fires at an emaciated rattlesnake before it can strike the flank of his horse. And if there were a soundtrack for all of this, something the gunslinger hears in his head as he squints in the white blast of noon sun, it would be written by Calexico.

This band, originally a side project from two members of the group Giant Sand, manages to combine rock, mariachi, country, and even ambient, to create a sound somewhere left of the soundtracks to the old spaghetti westerns. The band plays mariachi horns, vibraphones, accordians, organs, harmonicas, violin, maracas, and pedal steel guitar, with soft acoustic strumming, snare and kick, and even drum loop programming. All of this transcends a sound that could potentially be merely genre, or 'retro,' and becomes music wholly unique, something aching, intimate and vast, the way a desert is aching, intimate and vast.