Yahoo! Music Album Review

Released on 23/01/06
Label: Beggar's Banquet

Calla must have spent the last couple of years wondering why they haven't seen any of the Gloom Dollar that's been hurled at Interpol by the indie public. "Televise", from 2003, was a fine record - knowingly melodramatic, quietly stylish, romantic and monochromatic, everything that your over-earnest Interpol fan should have been searching for in a Second Favourite Group, surely? But, alas, Calla were overlooked - just another bunch of also-rans in last season's fashions.

"Collisions" begins to explain why. Although it starts well with "It Dawned On Me", which adds a cool, light pop touch to the none-more-indie template, almost bordering on the sly dream-pop of Drop Nineteens, the album quickly stagnates. Like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club before them, Calla find a style and pace that fits - a low maintenance, low effort, maximum cool (in theory) retread of the best bits of the Mary Chain, the Pixies, and Calexico - and then stick with it.

While that's not necessarily a problem as long as the band have the charm and style to pull it off (BRMC didn't, Calla on "Televise" did), another album of more of the same is clearly surplus to requirements. You can practically hear Calla coming to the same conclusion themselves as the album plays out - "It Dawned On Me" and "Initiate" glide along imperiously, cheekbones to the prow, but by "This Better Go As Planned" and the leaden "Play Dead", it sounds as if the band's batteries are steadily running out. Confidence ebbs, emotions run flat, the songs become more and more inconsequential.

At their best, in this state recall anther underachieving Beggar's Banquet band - Swell. But whereas Swell's slow-burning romanticism is always enlivened by singer David Freel's insomniac drawl, Calla's Aurelio Valle remains half asleep somehow - too enamoured of his own stylised vocal to really affect, too in thrall to the nursery rhyme traditions of fuzz pop to say anything startling with his lyrics. And, anyway, as previously mentioned, we already have a Swell. "So Far. So What" is such an accurate pastiche that you're left as non-plussed as the title.

An entire album of songs as seductive as "It Dawned On Me", and we might be onto something with Calla. But as it stands, they're just too little, too late.

    by Ian Watson