Calla, "Collisions"

At first I thought Calla's third album was good but before long I’ve come to think of them as the sort of band that owns the entire Low back catalogue but didn’t pay attention when Low's class was in session. Collisions is an ultimately bland record, not bad enough to warrant the master tapes being destroyed but certainly not interesting enough to make new listeners want to discover older albums.

Beggars Banquet

From what I can tell, Calla used to be a well respected band. Previous releases on Young God and Sub Rosa should be making me raise an eyebrow or two but Collisions has made me wary. What I can only presume is this album is the product of a band getting lazy and resting on its old credibility while watering down its music to appeal to the kind of people who think Coldplay are the most experimental band on earth.

Collisions is well executed but irredeemably unoriginal, I don’t know about the rest of the world but here in Dublin every “sensitive” rock band sounds like this. Granted most of them aren’t even half as talented as Calla but a lack of inspiration is a lack of inspiration no matter how good a musician you are. “So Far, So What” is typical of being well played but completely unmemorable. In fact listening to the record for what seems like the tenth time over the last few days I don’t actually remember hearing most of these songs before. The band seems to wake up towards the end of the album, after eight tracks of boredom there is all of a sudden a couple of tracks with backbone. “Testify” is about as good as it gets and for most of the song it is very good. The guitars are spiky, the drums are pounding and there’s some nice electric organ in the chorus. The vocals let it down, Valle sounds like he’s on a heavy dose of sedatives. “Swagger” continues the strong musical element, creating a powerful rhythm with guitars chugging and dancing all over the place. Valle still sounds doped to the eyes.

I can honestly say that apart from the couple of good tracks mentioned above, this CD will not be likely to be spun again under my roof.

samples:

• Initiate
• So Far, So What
• Testify