Califone is one of those annoyingly prolific bands — between new albums, reissues, and film scores they’ve completed about five or six projects in just the last couple of years — so another new record never seems like much of an event. Truth is, it’s not. Roots & Crowns is interesting enough at first listen, but the band’s weird sonic experiments never really go anywhere. Opener ‘Pink & Sour’ throws out some fun polyrhythms and sounds like a David Byrne solo track, and ‘A Chinese Actor’ is the kind of slick fuzz even Beck can’t write anymore. But from there the record veers into loose, downtempo jams that cling too closely to the gentle, bluesy lo-fi that characterized Califone’s first two records. This might not be surprising having read that a major ‘theme’ for this record stemmed from one band member’s obsession with the plaintive Psychic TV song ‘The Orchids’ (graced here with an equally plaintive cover), a song that sounds great alone, but obviously didn’t comprise an album’s worth of inspiration.
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