Collisions

We Say...

Review by Yancey Strickler

With the ascendance of the Strokes in 2001, the entire tenor of the New York music scene changed. Suddenly there was real money at stake — now the vague notions of FAME! GLORY! RICHES! and Being In A Band were no longer enough; the goals were much loftier. And many bands (some good, some atrocious) made good on the newfound attention, signing to major labels and at least semi-cashing in before sliding into eternal anonymity. But there were others, like Calla, who were too serious and proud to grab the money and run.

The first two Calla records — Calla (not available on eMusic but their best) and Scavengers — deftly straddle the increasingly blurred line between rural and urban. In a very literal way, they are suburban records: found-sound machinery clanks and Ennio Morricone-inspired arid guitar riffs collide and flirt, neither taking precedence over the other. It's music that could somehow afflict both agoraphobics and claustrophobics, an unsettling sound not made for widespread consumption.

And so in the great NYC gold rush of the early '00s, Calla were left without a date to the corpo-rock prom. Certainly they knew why — "music for 4 a.m." their frequent description — but it was difficult watching their friends and (worse) enemies get famous while they spun their wheels. Thus Televise, their first attempt to crane their necks out of the underground — and weakest album.

Collisions, the follow-up to Televise, isn't far off from its predecessor, but Calla are now much more comfortable playing the part of the rock band. The Scavengers to Televise transition brought a telling lineup change (the addition of another guitarist, Pete Gannon), and the departure of bassist/keyboardist Sean Donovan (a John Cage fan and arguably the most musically serious member of the group) signals yet another paradigm shift; in short, the ties to the avant-electronic sound of Calla have been severed, the negotiation between Serious Artists and Rock & Roll Saviors finally decided.

Songs such as "It Dawned on Me" and "Swagger" signal that rock & roll suits them after all. Frontman Aurelio Valle and drummer Wayne Magruder congeal beautifully on the up-tempo numbers, and the closer "Overshadowed" finds the band unified behind an epic crescendo. But it's "Pulverized" that's unquestionably the best song on the album and a stone-cold Calla classic. In some ways it's vintage Calla — mid-tempo, whispering, deflated — but the chorus-punctuating piano-and-keyboard swoon is classically beautiful in a way that would make pre-Collisions Calla flinch.

While Collisions is not the band's best album, it's the best of the new era. Calla R.I.P.; long live Calla.