Two Tastes, Great Together
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Sunday night’s Iron & Wine/Calexico show at Webster Hall, the first of three consecutive nights, had the feel of an album mixing session – in this case one for “In the Reins,” the recent EP jointly released by the two bands. Each of the constituent parts was heard independently, then combined.
As their joint-set demonstrated, Calexico and Iron & Wine answer glaring deficiencies in each other. Sam Beam, better known as Iron & Wine, has a restraint and songwriting skill that tends to focus Calexico’s sometimes wandering talents, while Calexico’s unruly energy force Beam to up the tempo and sing above a whisper to be audible.
First to take the stage was Calexico, from Tucson, Ariz. The group’s founding members, vocalist Joey Burns and drummer John Convertino, began as backing musicians for Howe Gelb’s Giant Sand, and they still often sound like a very good backing band in search of a front man. The group – long fascinated with the sounds of the American Southwest – has swelled to six-plus members. Their albums are an experimental blend of mariachi, Ennio Morricone, Nashville country, “Sketches of Spain” jazz, and indie rock. A few new songs, which opened the set, brought to mind the cavalier alt-country of Ryan Adams.
Calexico’s affinity for the Southwest extends beyond its native sounds, as the border-patrol-dodging fantasy “Across the Wire,” powered by an aggressive lap steel guitar, demonstrated. In case anyone was still having trouble placing the music, a video montage of a cowboy roundup amid red rock canyons (and, incongruously, black mule skinners) showed behind the band as they played.
Following Calexico was a much too brief set by Savador Duran, a Tucson flamenco singer-guitarist discovered performing in a hotel lounge during the recording of “In the Reins.” In the placid middle of this indie rock show, he appeared like an unbroken animal with his explosive strumming, operatic vocals, and muscular tongue-clicking. Wearing black boots, a flowing gray mane, and pants with vaquero-style medallions down the sides, Duran performed atop a wooden box to accentuated his musical boot-stomping. One song, that – with my junior high training in Spanish – seemed to chronicle a courtship between a cow and a bull, found him making excited animal sounds that may or may not have been coital in nature.
Beam took the stage next, wearing a large multicolored scarf and singing a largely monochromatic set. Beam has achieved a good deal of fame in the indie rock world with songs of hushed beauty, whispery vocals, and burbling guitar picking. I find it a wonderful cure for severe insomnia, but good for little else.
He enlivened his overlong set by inviting members of Calexico up in different combinations to render “old songs in a new way, just for kicks,” as he explained. The best new interpretation was a multilayered version of “On Your Wings,” the song that opened Beam’s breakthrough 2004 album “Our Endless Numbered Days.” It built to a Grateful Dead-like guitar jam, but retreated much too quickly.
Only when all the members of Calexico joined him did Beam really hit his stride. It’s apparent both parties actually worked at this collaboration. The quality of the song writing showed through on “Sixteen, Maybe Less,” where, over a melancholy slide guitar, Beam sang, “One grin and wink like the neon on a liquor store / we were sixteen maybe less, maybe a little more / I walked home smiling, I finally had a story to tell.”
Calexico and Beam might consider making this a permanent partnership – and rope Duran in, if possible. The sum of their parts was amply demonstrated on “He Lay in the Reins,” the song from which the EP takes its title. It’s built over a delicate bed of guitar – strummed, picked, and slid – that nonetheless sounds full. Beam takes to Calexico’s Southwestern motif with image-rich lyrics about a “tuckered” cowboy, a “gray stallion,” and “some tall stable girl … like grace from the earth.” But it’s Duran’s popping mouth-effects and hearty, almost gregorian chant, making an unexpected appearance in the middle, that saves the song. These strange bedfellows could do worse than to tie the knot.
Tonight (125 E. 11th Street at Bowery, 212-353-1600).