There’s always been something cinematic about Califone, but not in
the traditional Hollywood widescreen sense. Instead, Califone’s music
flickers dimly, as if thrown from a rickety old projector, with threads
shaking at the edges of the screen, colors bled and saturated. Their
songs tumble forward with a rusty momentum, accompanied by the threat
that a reel is coming loose or the projector is about to strip a
gear.
“I always write in front of a movie,” says Tim Rutili, the band’s
singer and chief songwriter. “Sometimes I turn the sound off and just
sit there with the guitar and zone out with an image and write. I know
a lot of songwriters who do that, actually. Sometimes if you have a
visual, something to look at, it keeps you from thinking too much about
what you’re doing. And sometimes if you think too much about what
you’re doing, nothing happens. You think it to death.”
Rutili studied film as an undergraduate, but he left school to tour
with Friends of Betty, the band that eventually became the legendary
Red Red Meat. Now, with Califone, Rutili has returned to his original
field of study with All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, the
new Califone album that serves as a de facto soundtrack to a
full-length film of the same name, which Rutili wrote and directed.
“The whole idea, once we figured out what we were doing, was to make
an album that stands alone as an album,” Rutili explains. “So it’s
pretty much song-based. Unlike a lot of the other film work we’ve done
with Califone, it’s not drone-based or improvised so much. And we
wanted to make a film that stood up on its own, too, so it’s a
narrative film with characters, story, and dialogue, and it uses the
music but it doesn’t depend on the music. Hopefully, there’s nothing in
this that’s going to look like a music video—hopefully.”
All My Friends Are Funeral Singers—the
film—stars Angela Bettis as a clairvoyant living in an old house
populated by ghosts. Some of these ghosts include the members of
Califone making their cinematic acting debuts. “They’re all young
Montgomery Clifts. All my bandmates are amazing
actors—amazing actors. I knew that they had charisma
beyond human comprehension, but…” Rutili quips, laughing. “I think
none of us were feeling that comfortable in front of the camera, but we
ended up having a really good time.”
The album, meanwhile, easily ranks with 2006’s Roots &
Crowns as the best work Califone have done. Their loose-limbed
folk instrumentation is still present, with ragged acoustic guitars,
pianos, and fiddles lining the edges of a more industrious sound;
machines and drones whir alongside electric hums, and amplifier
cabinets emit fragmented, processed lines. “Funeral Singers” is the
obvious point of entry, with a banjo and harmony vocals boosting its
careful, hymnlike melody. Album opener “Giving Away the Bride” is
catchy without ever sounding like any music you’ve heard before, while
“Polish Girls” is a gentle acoustic lilt that crystallizes into a
beautiful crescendo. But “Buñuel” may be their finest hour yet,
a shambolic jam that stops and starts in fits, before fully igniting in
a blunt, squealing instrumental climax that fulfills every empty
promise Wilco made with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
“Buñuel” also points toward Rutili’s cinematic inspiration.
“I was kind of obsessing over [Spanish director Luis] Buñuel
films,” he says. “Especially Exterminating Angel. And there
was a film called After Life, which is a Japanese film from
the mid-’90s, and there’s a Spanish film called Spirit of the
Beehive from the early ’70s. A lot of the songs were written as
the script was being written. Some of it is directly related to the
film, like inner dialogues for some of these peripheral characters,
using imagery from the film. And some of it is about the process of
making a film. It’s very strange, I’m kind of realizing what a lot of
this stuff is about now, a little after the fact.”
Califone’s current tour has them performing an abbreviated,
conventional set, but the rest of the performance is dedicated to a
live soundtrack of All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, which
screens over the band’s heads. “It’s really strange how different
cities are reacting to this thing,” says Rutili. “Some people laugh
like crazy and some people don’t. That’s probably another thing that a
normal filmmaker doesn’t get to experience—touring with your film
and feeling people push and pull it in their own direction as they see
it. It’s pretty interesting.” 