Calla
Televise
Arena Rock

When I was a freshman in high school, my US History class' student teacher showed us what a little Googling has revealed to be a documentary called "Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam." Judging from customers' reviews on amazon.com, it's a poignant, gripping doc in which well-known actors read candid, powerful letters sent home from the front by soldiers in Vietnam.

Other than a fleeting recollection of being riveted by the movie, the only thing I remember is a song.

But oh, what a song. The opening bars of Jimi Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?" jumped out of that mono TV speaker and kicked me in the head. Weaned on a steady diet of hair metal bands, the Beach Boys and a smidgen of 2 Live Crew, my 15-year-old self was privy for the first time to music's abstract power to transport — not through the relatability of generalized lyrics, but through the sonic tripping of psychological triggers. For me, the raw guitar scrapings that open Hendrix's song were helicopter blades slicing through the humid jungle air. The signature opening electric guitar licks demanded that my easily distracted, teenage self sit up straight and pay attention to the stories I was about to hear: These were soldiers talking, son.

And all this from a song about drug use.

Twelve years later, we're at war again, and "Monument," off of Calla's third album, Televise, is having a nearly identical effect. The sequenced keyboard beat that opens the song and flits in and out of the mix is more chopper-like than even Hendrix's guitar gnashing. Predictably, snare drums conjure up images of US troops hastily moving through the desert. The drawn-out, devastating riff around which the song is built oozes weapons of mass destruction — the US cruise missile, shock-and-awe kind, not the low-tech Iraqi mustard gas kind.

Regardless of whether the New York-based trio intended it, "Monument" is a soundtrack for a geopolitical throwdown, what you put on when you can't listen to the anchors anymore, when you can't read another line of war stories, when you need something to listen to but certainly don't want something light and fun ... when you tip your head back in frustration and just wish the shit would end, so the people running this war can start sweeping up the shambles our crumbling economy.

Naturally, "Monument" isn't about any of this stuff. Its lyrics, as far as I can tell, are about being haunted by the waking dream of a lost love. Then again, for some people that may not be so far from the war with Iraq.

As for the rest of Televise, it's a slow-motion slice of rock brilliance. "Don't Hold Your Breath" takes the mid-'90s alt-rock formula and slows it down to a crawl, revealing nuance, beauty and emotional resonance in bass lines and guitar riffs that, if you sped them up, wouldn't sound far off from a lot of those MTV bands most of us have long forgotten. At times, Aurelio Valle's voice cracks in the same mellow, dramatic way Robert Smith's does in The Cure's "Catch" (an important departure from Smith's typical melodramatic technique.)

Of course, Valle sounds nothing like Smith and Calla's resemblance to early Weezer and their ilk is superficial at best. Yet there's enough commonality to make anyone who came of musical age in the mid-'80s to mid-'90s instantly identify with the band's M.O. That familiarity ultimately makes the uneasy Televise oddly comforting at a time when comfort seems to be in short supply.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)