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Recommended by us on 10th December 2010
...according to our Brian on Thu 09 Dec, 2010.
These guys are doing something a little unusual. They're an NY based outfit who blend folksy art-rock, gospel, Americana & and an abstracted form of psychedelic blues into something that sounds much more appealing than what I just said. The lady singer is the main draw here. Somewhere between the Karens Dalton & Carpenter with maybe a bit of Grace Slick & Joni Mitchell. A powerful, bluesy voice full of rich, striking tones and remarkable Earth mother vibes. The music is a really potent unpredictable brew as well. Impossible to categorise & therefore pretty compulsive listening. there's no contemporary band out there straddling so many bases at once whilst having a definable stripped-back sound like this. I reckon if you like any of the singers I've listed and also dig experimental, windswept organic rock music with integrity you'll be pleasantly taken by this bunch. A pleasant surprise, even though it sounds like a lost mid 70s classic, it also has the essence of something satisfyingly new & fresh. The Wire cover ('Heartbeat') is pretty superb too! Unlike Howlin' Rain who I'm gonna have to stomach tonight. Wish me luck....
Ryan and Sara met Don at a show at Melvin's, a bar on St. Claude in the Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans. Ryan and Sara had just begun writing and recording songs together on an old 4-track with a mic hanging from the blade of a ceiling fan in the middle of that stifling sweaty summer, but they would soon part ways and leave New Orleans. Over the next couple of years they relocated to Providence together and later settled in Brooklyn where Don had also settled after Katrina.
Life of Love is the first collection of songs Callers wrote and recorded exclusively in New York as a three-piece. Naturally the band's sound grew in volume in response to the volume of the city; however, they held on to what makes them so consistently affecting: their raw spartan style, anchored by Sara's sensually tough vocals, and Ryan and Don's Southern-honed chops as multi-instrumentalists. The album started with the band's cover of Wire's "Heartbeat", and the idea of creating something simple and cathartic. Using borrowed amps and mics, in bedrooms and in studios, and by the grace of their good friends, Callers recorded Life of Love in intense spurts over the course of a year. Unlike the experimental ballads on their debut Fortune, the new songs pulse with gritty urgency, colored by the sounds of damaged gear and the earnest spirit of a middle-school gospel choir. The result is an album stripped to the core, an expression of the inexpressible space between us and the places we inhabit and the people we share those places with. "...I actually had to shut it off because it got to be too much. And of course, that's meant as high praise." Pitchfork // "Fortune is a real breath of fresh air, particularly notable for vocalist Sara Lucas' arresting delivery; in the quiet acoustic numbers she sounds like a reined in Josephine Foster, while the harder-edged, sprawling rock sounds of the title track and 'The Upper Lands' find her effortlessly inhabiting a persona that's like a cross between Patti Smith and Karen Dalton” Boomkat //
1. You are an arc, 2. Glow, 3. Life of love, 4. Young people, 5. Heartbeat, 6. How you hold your arms, 7. Dressed in blue, 8. Roll, 9. Bloodless ties.
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