Album Review: Califone - Stitches

This first album in four years for Chicagoan roots experimentalists Califone – recorded out of their hometown comfort zone for the first time in various locales in the American southwest – is a typically assured and defiantly offbeat collection. Tim Rutili's incredibly expressive voice is again one of their chief assets, alongside their exquisite patchwork arrangements, instrumental dexterity and willingness to utilise sounds from both the past and present. There's always something slightly unnerving underpinning Califone's rustic ruminations – vaguely ominous, even creepy – but the inherent beauty that's also omnipresent completely mitigates any such petty concerns.