Calla
Gloom With a View
Published by Under
The Radar
“I’m
not that depressed,” says Calla’s Aurelio Valle, remembering very
clearly a review of his band’s third album, Televise. It said
that, from the sound of it, either the frontman won’t take his medication
or he’s taking too much of it. Valle laughs it off: “I thought it
was very funny, but then it made me wonder, ‘Should I be on medication?’”
Yeah, there’s sadness in Calla’s music, but it’s mostly a matter of selection. More interested in moving people than making them move, they just think the darker stuff is more interesting. “It’s much easier to write happy songs,” says Valle. “If you can really express something and make people react to it, I think you accomplish a lot more than just making them dance. It gives you more to work with -- the melodies and everything.” Believing that part of the mood spectrum to be a wellspring of possibilities keeps Calla’s consistently dark material surprisingly unpredictable. If they tend toward the minor chords, it’s likely in service of textures, which form a large part of their sound. After all, rich atmosphere and sunny progressions aren’t necessarily the best of friends.
The New York trio credits its thick vibe only partly to its influences. The press is full of comparisons, and Valle thinks they mostly fit: “They’ll say bands like My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and Mary Chain, Massive Attack and Tricky, which we grew up listening to. We love those bands and they’re definitely an inspiration. Then they say other bands like Nine Inch Nails or Yo La Tengo or Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and they’re good bands and all, but we don’t listen to them for inspiration. I think it’s good, because the critics are trying to pinpoint what we’re doing and they’re having a difficult time doing it.” I know I am.
“The melody is the most important thing,” Valle says of constructing songs that succeed in both ambition and accessibility. “When you’re inspired by certain songs or certain records you somehow subconsciously morph these melodies together. You take inspiration from [the sound of] a garbage truck sometimes.” Such reappraisals of everyday racket account for Calla’s backdrop of ambient sound. “It’s not necessarily a melody,” he explains, “but if you’re able to take some kind of sequence or even a beat, a lot of times when you hear that rhythm, automatically this melody just pops into your head. And then when you play on top of that chord, you find another melody, and they all start intertwining with each other.” Digging Calla is nothing if not becoming entangled among their seductive strands.
Touring the States after hitting a few European capitals and nearly every major city in Germany, Calla are at L.A.’s Spaceland club tonight. The crowd is thick and attentive, and I’m overhearing things from a couple of females about Valle’s lethal good looks. Officially a three-piece consisting of Valle on vocals and guitar; Sean Donovan on bass, keyboards, and programming; and Wayne Magruder on drums and programming, Calla are joined on the road by guitarist Peter Gannon, who also contributes to their records. Sounds and sequences join the mix here and there. Magruder, playing a kit without tom-toms, sometimes uses a maraca as a drumstick. You don’t generally see too many encores at an arms-folded joint like Spaceland, but Calla do a quick one after healthy applause. A small huddle of girls greets the frontman as he comes off stage.
Earlier the guys are wiped out from the day’s drive from San Francisco. They pose for photos and, save for dinner plans and an update on the Mavericks game, don’t talk much. Once I roll tape in the upstairs bar, they give freely. Donovan eventually peels off to do another interview a few feet away.
To break the ice before prying into Valle’s blues, I ask them about their hip hometown, Brooklyn, New York. They moved there eight years ago from Texas, where Valle and Magruder had a band called Factory Press, and Magruder and Donovan worked together as Fallen Vlods. “New York’s always had a very active community,” says Donovan. “It’s just that now the media has focused the spotlight. It wasn’t there maybe two years ago.” But The Strokes became a sort of Nirvana for the area, and now it seems every rock band holding guitars and surrounded by buzz is from the Apple, Brooklyn in particular. “That’s traditionally kind of the story of New York, though, isn’t it?” Donovan continues. “That basically everyone there is from somewhere else. And they congregate into that small area -- either the East Village, or now it’s Williamsburg -- to try to do their art.” Magruder doesn’t think the Seattle analogy necessarily fits: “I don’t think it’s at the magnitude of something like the blow-up in Seattle. That was a small media market that hadn’t seen anything like that before, whereas there’s a certain amount of expectation if you live in New York that you’re gonna receive attention.”
According to Valle, the bands have been at it for a while: “A lot of the bands that are doing really well are friends of ours that we’ve known for six or seven years from going out. If you’re into a certain thing or a certain scene, it really is like a small town.” But sometimes small towns grab the attention of the world. “I think a lot of it had to do with September 11th,” he continues. “A lot of it had to do with The Strokes doing well, but at the same time there are a lot of really great bands that deserve the attention.” Among Calla’s friends are local heroes Interpol, The Walkmen, and The Boggs.
The band’s move from Texas had less to do with joining an existing scene and more to do with seeking new creative stimuli. Valle explains, “With all the reviews we started getting, we started realizing that we were really drawing from our environment, from when we lived in Texas -- you know, big desolate, open space. It definitely shows in the music; we like Texas and all, but for the kind of music we were doing, we really had to move. People were responding, but we kind of took it as far as we were gonna go. We needed to go to New York. We needed the inspiration and the sense of urgency you get from a big city.”
“You have your open space and then you have your extremely busy city, and it’s like these complete polar opposites,” Valle says of the link between environments and relationships. “Then you have your night and day, and the music can be extremely big and bright sounding or it can be extremely quiet and dark. I think there’s everything in it. It’s the same with a relationship. There’s the good and there’s the bad.” And admittedly he doesn’t shy from the bad. “A lot of times it could just straight-up be a specific line that is very negative, which may be something I’m saying in a song but I can’t really openly say to the person.”
Valle says Televise is less personal than 1999’s Calla but more personal than 2001’s Scavengers. “Every record basically depends on where we’re at and what I feel like and what we need to express,” he explains. “The second record has a lot more other perspectives, different points of view as opposed to just mine. With Televise I wanted to be a lot more straightforward and not as vague, although it’s still vague. I like to keep it that way, because I like when the listener interprets a song in their own way. That allows them to relate to the song more.” It also serves the sense of mystery at the center of Calla’s art. Not a lot makes it past Valle’s lips, leaving room for moods to write their own lines. And his low, breathy vocals work best when gnawing on just a few syllables.
But he gets enough out to reveal that his relationships have caused real pain. Is he down on love? “To a degree,” he admits. “When I’m in certain relationships it’s somehow never a happy-go-lucky relationship. Somehow I always get involved in the darker side of things. Every record involves one certain girl I was dating at the time. They never know that, because obviously I don’t write specifically, but I’m able to express myself in the songs in a very vague way. I feel like I’m exorcising my demons. I’m basically finding satisfaction in writing about those kinds of things that happen.”
But to say that Valle needs to pop another Zoloft is to miss part of his message. “I think there’s a lot of desire and hope and love,” he says. “When somebody interprets it in their own way, that’s maybe how they want to hear it, so if they think it’s extremely depressing and they think I’m a completely miserable, depressed guy, that’s fine. But for the most part I’m not. I have to dig really deep and not be afraid to sing about certain things.”