Album Review: Calexico - Algiers

New Orleans is a pretty good fit for Tuscon, Arizona outfit Calexico. The band has always been surrounded by an air of something ancient and otherworldly as they delved into haunting Americana with a Mariachi heart from their home base in the desert near the US border with Mexico.

Four years after the release of the critically acclaimed Garden Ruin, the band decamped to New Orleans to record Algiers and that city's rich history, both musical and otherwise, runs thick through these songs.

Though the Mariachi-style horns of days past have been toned down, there are still plenty of dusty brass and drum brushes that sound like the desert. Instruments wheeze and puff, like they're shaking themselves off after a long rest, grateful to be given an airing in an era of everything electronic and auto-tuned. And the songs – though mellower than in the past – take on lives that dance their way through the dust. First single, Para, is a great introduction to the album, a swirling, melancholy piece that delivers a real gut punch as the darkness threatens to swallow it up. Joey Burns' voice and the harmonies that are applied to it, sound reminiscent at times of The Jayhawks, that other great modern Americana outfit; one band from the north, making music in the snow, the other creating beauty out of a hot haziness.

This album will stay with you and haunt you until you give in and listen again. It's a stunning piece of work that deserves a much bigger audience than Calexico has so far ever attracted in Australia but hopefully it might at least mean we get to see them tour again.