Califone: The Villager’s Companion

Whether it be through the lens of Red Red Meat or during his later years as leader of Califone, Tim Rutili hasn’t spent a career picking apart life’s intricacies: he’s revelled in them.

Rutili songs have been forever masqueraded in mystery, and while sonically oscillating between the distinctive tangled bluegrass twang and countrified serenades through a swathe of pedals and cracked tape loops, he has delivered his own version of homespun warmth.

Following the excellent 2023 Califone release, Villagers, The Villager’s Companion is far more than its title suggests (apostrophe and all). Whilst recorded during the same sessions as Villagers, these songs aren’t akin to a demo version bonus disc. Even despite the song titles, littered with ramshackle text-speak likened to references on stray bits of paper in the studio, these aspects add to The Villager’s Companion’s majesty instead of reducing it.

Six Organs of Admittance: Time is Glass

Having spent years covering so much ground across the experimental folk landscape, the room in which Rutili manoeuvres is vast. Take opening cut, Every Amnesia Movie. Sonically it’s the kind of song The National dream about writing, while the electric chug of Burn the Skeets. Bleach the Books sees Califone in untethered rock mode – the bass line alone, hitting the same emotional frequencies as listening to peak New Order.

While Every Amnesia Movie sees Rutili exploring existentialism and how we’re all moving that much closer to ending up in the dirt, on A Blood Red Corduroy 3 Piece Suit, he goes to the upper reaches of the Califone sound world. Rutili’s abstract narratives (“The current running through your hand / I felt it in your drama club embrace”), like the fabric of film and prose stitched together. And Bullet B4 the Sound is from the same thread. A tale containing ideas pulled from far flung places, it’s an acid trip committed to tape, underlining the unique, free-your-mind aesthetic that Califone has always possessed.

Elsewhere, and inspired by the Los Angeles jazz bassist, Jaco Pastorious is a subtle electric jolt brimming with more of Rutili’s collage-like wordplay (“It’s the worst time to be an amputee in Hollywood”), while the lo-fi country of Gas Station Roller Dogs places you at the scene of the crime. The grease-stained floors of said gas station filling the nostrils, and amid a backdrop of clear blue skies, the story unfolds where the protagonist takes their mail order bride on a joyride.

There are shadowy moments, too. Antenna Mountain Death Blanket, a song where Rutili explores the same dark undercurrents as Ed Kuepper on his underrated Lost Cities LP. Then there’s Family Swan, which is vintage Califone. Like Roomsound’s St. Augustine (A Belly Full of Swans), Rutili uses the swan as a shield to unravel a story about suicides and spending a lifetime been tormented and gas lit by parents.

Delivered with a bone-raw countrified blues aesthetic, Crazy as a Loon sees Rutili spinning a yarn from the back porch overlooking the mountains; the protagonist, a dreamer-cum-provocateur somewhere between Jack Kerouac and Harry Angstrom. It underlines Califone’s own wanderings and elusiveness, and with a line like “My life got sadder than a country song”, Mark Eitzel couldn’t have written a better one. That rebellion-spirit, cloaked in ambiguity, as Rutili’s stories continue to blur the lines and evade.

Which is exactly why we keep coming back. The Villager’s Companion, every bit its predecessor’s equal if not better. That “Safe bet” Rutili’s references during A Blood Red Corduroy 3 Piece Suit, the perfect summation of the Califone experience. And it only gets better on the back of this release.

The Villager’s Companion is out now via Jealous Butcher Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.