Califone

With its latest collection of blues-oriented roots rock, Quicksand/Cradlesnakes, Chicago's Califone has kicked it up a notch. While Quicksand sees the band reaching a new level of creativity and sophistication, it also captures a venture into a more accessible and often tuneful region. Last year's Roomsound lent itself to a more ethereal workout of rock-and-blues deconstruction. This time around, Tim Rutili and Ben Massarella (Califone's core) offer a dash more of everything they've cooked up before: folk-tinged, stream-of-consciousness lyricism, backwoods found-instrument percussion, and layered but subtle, electronic soundscapes. It's 21st-century laptop glitch by way of early-last-century Americana.

The album starts atmospherically and builds on a ghostly theme of redemption, as Rutili conjures a proverbial sacrificial goat ("Braid your sins into its mane and kick it to the county line") over noisy layers of percussion that blend to dissonant beauty in "Horoscopic. Amputation. Honey." The pace picks up as "Your Golden Ass" stomps to the beat of guest drummer Rebecca Gates (the Spinanes) while Rutili's slack-string guitar keeps the action moving. A steel drum and seemingly endless layers of Massarella percussion add a complex, calypso-meets-country flavor to the proceedings.

During a couple of tracks -- the "Cat Eats Coyote" interlude and "(Red)" -- Califone demonstrates its ability to turn noise into organic, nautical beauty. "(Red)," in particular, creaks like the cadence of a ship breaking waves in the middle of the Atlantic. Similarly, it's this strong focus on timekeeping that underlines "When Leon Spinx Moved Into Town," a gorgeous, lazy squawk rocker that buzzes in and out to the beat of a rocking chair on a wood floor. "Vampiring Again" is the most pop-oriented of any of the tracks here: Rutili sings "imperfection, imperfection, imperfection" while the song seduces and hooks you like its namesake subject matter. "Stepdaughter" is a great, understated album-ender to a great, understated album. This is Califone at its deconstructed best; rarely has deconstruction been so well put together.