Gaby Moreno & Calexico Play The Bowery Ballroom

This life is made up of endless dichotomy—light and dark, myth and reality, staying and going. It’s the most unsettling thing in the world to feel pulled in two different directions, like the very basis of your existence is ripping apart at the seams. Calexico, named for the California border town, not only negotiates a balance between opposing forces but manages to zoom in and enhance the individual beauty on each side.

Calexico’s current tour to promote Edge of the Sun is an exploration of life’s journey, its destination and motivations, and the emotional reactions that are sparked in transit: “Where do you fall when you have nowhere to go? Where do you go where you have no one to see? What do you see when you have nothing to feel? What do you feel when you’re all alone?” Joey Burns and John Convertino create a fearless cast mediates the borderlands of love, pain, loneliness, and sanity.

Guatemalan songstress Gaby Moreno accented the show with her own dynamic fusion of duality. Her collaboration with Calexico “Miles from the Sea” is haunting on brass and string. The sentiment is simply a yearning from a place to call one’s own: “Dreams about falling from the sky through the sea while the moon lays out a bed of bones to call home.”

Gaby Moreno

Calexico travels from the soothing “Bullets and Rocks” to the Dylan-esque “When the Angels Played” to a noisy and confused “Cumbia de Donde.” Their sound is mature, textured, and more multifaceted than ever, riding and blurring the lines of genre and culture, time and space.