Calidad (Bedazzled)
by Jamie Kiffel
There once was a man who liked the twisted, natural shape of wild roses so much that he let them run wild and cover his entire house. The house became famous as a reminder of nature’s unadulterated form and the power of an untrained climber. Difference Engine allows thin strands of mismatched guitars to sinuously trail up and around this disc, twisting through each other in ambiguous, dissident chords that dip and drag their wilting strands in an organic mesh that is vaguely differentiated from a wild field by Margie Wienk’s slightly stronger-stemmed voice blooming through it.
Notably, however, Difference Engine’s flowers are not nearly as stately as roses, and they certainly have no thorns to add an interesting dichotomy of beauty and masochism to the mixture. At times, however, like a randomly-chosen bouquet, the flower mixtures do come together to make a statement that outgrows their elements. “Pan-Am” asks in a dolorous, almost Gregorious mixture, “What if I snapped and I went down?” “Calidad (Dadilac)” also pulls most of its stray weeds together into something like a folk musician playing a role in a road trip movie stationed in the Old West (picture a burro-rider with a gun and a tape of Tom Paxton hitching a ride down Route 66). Largely, however, there are quite a few tumbleweeds on here, and unfortunately, most are still waiting for the wind to pick up and move them along.