I often come to bands at a point in their trajectory that isn’t the first iteration of that group, or the music even. I enjoy diving deep, not only into their back catalogue – if there is one – but also into their musical heritage and its various offshoots.
One of those bands I’ve been doing that with recently is Califone. I knew Tim Rutili had come from Red Red Meat (RRM), a more bluesy-sounding version of his studio project but ultimately similar in sound. I’d heard a few of their tracks. And yet, that experimental aspect of Califone’s music seemed a bigger leap from those origins. To my ears, at least.
How did Tim arrive in such a place? I naïvely assumed there were slowcore beginnings to this journey. However, I was blown away to discover he’d been part of Friends Of Betty, a one-album punk rock blues band from Chicago who were playing in the late 80’s. They recorded Blind Faith II and released it on vinyl and cassette in 1988 on Underdog Records. I’ve never seen their album in real life, where each cover is hand-painted and therefore unique – although the UK edition dispensed with this idea and went with a collage-style cover of a half-naked woman on a backdrop of blue sky and fluffy clouds. As far from Califone as you might imagine, but no less experimental it would seem.
This is what would become Red Red Meat. A clean, more acoustic version and more of a focus on that bluesy sound.
And this is where I think things got more interesting and the more liminal period between RRM and Califone brought about something that connects to the traditional American folk music while also bringing in the future through the use of sequencers and loops. So, yeah, banjo and samples might be one way to think about it; however, that’s not even close to the music Loftus would come to make.
Slowcore is perhaps most closely related to The National in a modern sense. It’s roots stretch back to the Grunge era, though, with bands like Codeine. A slowing down and more folksy way of making rock music. Rex is a band I’ve heard a smattering of songs from over the years through friends and friends’ stereos. They were contemporaries of Red House Painters and alike in the early-to-mid nineties and their drummer, Doug Scharin clearly loved to experiment with sound – an aside: Doug makes feedback music, a genre I dipped in to thanks to the five or so minutes at the end of The Smashing Pumpkins’ track Drown, which featured on the soundtrack to the film, Singles.
(Forget about Billy’s vocal whine, those last four-plus minutes of feedback are something special. But this isn’t about the Pumpkins and ego, this is about Loftus. Let’s get back to them.)
So, Doug’s band, Rex, happened to be on tour with RRM in the late 90’s. While the UK media was full Britpop (ugh!), under the radar bands from the US, in particular Chicago, were setting out on more interesting journeys. Experimenting in taking their slowcore roots and expanding it into the electronic landscape that the city of Chicago was famous for. Or mixing a musical cocktail of infinite dreams to suit multiple tastes. Inventing and innovating for their own sake while remaining indie enough for their audiences to dig it.
The Loftus Wikipedia page suggests that once the 1997 RRM/Rex tour was done, the record label execs from A&M Records had an idea to contrive a loose, experimental set of songs by pulling various members of each band together and giving them studio time to write and record. This kind of freedom provided by major labels sounds, to me, like some sort of magic land that simply didn’t exist unless you were a huge star.
Regardless of the origin story, the idea of picking from a larger group of talented musicians interested in experimenting and seeing what happens is a solid one. The resulting Loftus album has breadth and depth for the listener, although what you might call ‘songs’ feature amongst sketches of sounds and sonic landscapes that pull ideas from drone, blues, country, electronica, and indie rock to form hazy, nebulous musical interludes, often instrumental. Almost like the musicians had jammed for a while and the resulting sounds held enough substance to be considered finished.
What this means is the Loftus album is like a piece of art, a concept that cannot be grasped in its individual parts and yet somehow makes a coherent whole. Fans of Royal Trux will know that feeling!
Tracks like the hypnotic King Carp in a Dan Ryan Ditch that explores loops and samples before crashing into your face like a speeding truck with its drums and noise, or more singularly focused tracks like the banjo-led Theme From Loftus Nine serve as gateways to the more ‘obvious’ songs such as Cake, or Stolen From a Rifle Clean Brothel. And then there are the songs that flit between both, such as Haywine which is catchy in an almost indescribable way.
It’s not ‘easy’ music that you can sing along to, or even hum; and yet, it remains a compelling artifact of its time, showcasing the liminal state through which Tim and his collaborators moved to become the acts we know today.
The album was reissued by Jealous Butcher Records on vinyl in 2013, with its screen-printed sleeve and hand-finished sandpaper and jawbone motif keeping that thread of unique art coming through that was present back in the punk blues days of Friends Of Betty. And you can stream it via the Califone Bandcamp page – which I recommend you do.