Feast Of Wire: 20th Anniversary Deluxe Reissue
CITY SLANG
9/10
FEAST OF WIRE is where Calexico’s music truly started to match the sometimes terrible grandeur of the landscape it described, and the human dramas being played out in it. The broiling desert, sunbaked, cracked earth beneath the bleeding feet of the endless migrant shuffle, the refugee wind that blows and never stops.
There wasn’t much between them that multi-instrumentalists Joey Burns and John Convertino couldn’t play, but on 1998’s , the first album they made as Calexico, loosely an album set in the duo’s adopted home of the American Southwest, the hard land alongMexican border, the duo were augmented on key tracks by pedal steel, mariachi trumpets, jazzy horns. There were lots of twanging guitars, Latin rhythms. Critics were quick to describe the songs as “cinematic”, the music as “widescreen”. There were tracks that made them think of unmade westerns by Leone and Peckinpah. Morricone’s spaghetti western themes were often mentioned. It was certainly music that spoke more than one language.
