Misfits. Out-takes and oddballs. The Villager’s Companion, you will be unsurprised to learn, is a sibling to Califone’s previous album Villagers. Like an echo of the lightly arranged horde of treasures and pocket flotsam on that album’s cover, it gathers together a loose bundle of supplementary material recorded at the same time that, for one reason or another just didn’t find its place.
It is fair to wonder about what sort of thing might not be at home on a Califone record, they are after all a band with an open door to different sounds, approaches and members. But by the same scuffed token nothing here feels wildly out of place or unexpected. A merch table release last year, its little orphan songs are now getting a fuller life out in the world. As a whole it’s understandably more fractured and less focussed than Villagers but there’s plenty to enjoy.
According to main man Tim Rutili the two covers at the end of the record (Mecca Normal’s ‘The Family Swan’ and John Prine’s ‘Crazy as A Loon’) were in some sense stepping stones on the way to writing the Villagers songs. It’s easy to consider Califone as operating somewhere in-between the two, a rough-edged jumble of underground art punk and country folk, but equally these versions illuminate the links between them. Raw and poetic ‘The Family Swan’ becomes a laidback country blues in Rutili’s hands, and he goes a touch more country than Prine on the rueful and amused ‘Crazy As A Loon’.
Both are story songs offering weary life wisdoms and both glint with eye-catching images. Not really a narrative or confessional songwriter, Rutili recedes from his songs, the stories are rarely clear but he’s great on mysterious, evocative moments. ‘A Blood Red Corduroy 3 Piece Suit’ comes with an appropriate amount of thrift store dust on it from the title alone and a line like “the current running through your hands, I felt it in your drama club embrace” puts you right in a moment even though you aren’t clear what is happening. ‘Gas Station Roller Doggs’ similarly paints a picture from the title on, a vignette of roadside wonder in small details carried on slide guitar. At the more surreal end ‘Jaco Pastorius’ considers the pros and cons of being an amputee in Hollywood.
I suppose it doesn’t hurt right now to remember that America can also be gentle and good naturedly weird. Califone turn the dial to a different cultural channel, on a highway glide below the drones and rhythm of traffic, the romance of the mythic in the everyday, shimmering in the mediated imagination, in song and film, in music that never ends but goes on in all directions.
