Indie Rock Grows Up and Gets Cranky

Make no mistake: Calla is a solid rock 'n' roll band. Just look at its resume-it's headed straight for early admission to Indie Rock U, an OC nod, an Urban Outfitters mix, a Plug nomination, a lukewarm Pitchfork review-the list goes on. It's even got a crippling reverb addiction and a place in Brooklyn. By all accounts, this is a good Indie band. They've got the checklist covered, even smothered.

Armed with his encyclopedic knowledge of the genre his band falls into so neatly, vocalist Aurelio Valle takes issue with the disappointment expressed by so many music fans at the growing acceptance of indie rock.

"If we had this conversation when I was like 23 years old, I would have agreed with them," he said, "I would have been like 'Fuck that.'" Calla did not want to give up making music, though, so it got smart about sticking around.

Calla's been around for almost 10 years now, so it shouldn't be a surprise that it's honed its survival instinct to a fine art. Valle has what appears to be a tour guide's confidence in his knowledge of the industry he calls home.

"When you get older you realize the music industry is a business," he explained. "If you want to keep making records for a living, if you want to keep doing this, there's ways that you have to go about making a living out of it."

It's hard not to understand Calla's latest album, Collisions, as a specimen of Valle's grow-up-and-get-real attitude. The hard-driven guitar riffs, disembodied lyrics, and aforementioned reverb obsession combine to make listenable music with the help of a well-traveled algorithm that departs from a reputation Valle admits is somewhat more avant-garde.

"We started out experimenting, and just working with combining a lot of aspects of ambient music, electronic and stuff," he said. "With the second record we started focusing in on the songs a bit more, using more organic elements of instrumentation, still experimenting a lot-the third record even more so. By the time we were recording the fourth album, we knew we wanted to write a really guitar-driven record."

Nevertheless, Valle doesn't see the development of Calla as a progression toward disillusionment, or worse, toward selling out, claiming that learning how to survive in the marketplace has not unduly influenced the music.

"When we made [Collisions]," he said, "we didn't have marketability in mind." He emphasized that the album was a "very natural and necessary record to make, creatively and mentally."

Valle attributes the positive reception of Collisions not to the meeting of certain common standards, but to the independent strength of an album that wholly deserves its praise. "There are a lot of politics involved, but at the same time, people react to something good no matter what."

The first single off of Collisions, "It Dawned on Me," seems to get at a lot of the issues Calla aimed to confront with the creation of this album. As the opening track of the record, it channels the band's characteristic bass pulse and exultant guitars toward an anthem-like attitude that carries through most of the other tracks. Furthermore, the lyrics seem to capture the defiance of Calla's newfound resolve: "As far as I know, let it go / 'cause it's never quite what it seems / you should know, but you don't / 'cause you've dropped yourself to your knees / it dawned on me." Calla's calling out someone or something here, and even if the target's not obvious, it's clear that there's some hard-won confidence going on.

Beyond other people's reaction to the latest album, Collisions represents something of a watershed achievement for the band itself. Valle emphasizes that these songs almost never made it to our ears.

"We came close to just calling it quits for a while," he said. "But in the end the music we were writing was inspiring enough, and we felt confident enough to make it a Calla record. I think the triumph was in finishing the record, and the fact that people appreciate it now is a plus." Still, he said, "We won't compromise."

Some people, including yours truly, will look at things like recent OC exposure and a decreasingly experimental sound and immediately think compromise. Certainly most listeners would be hard-pressed to find anything remarkable or new about what Calla is doing with music right now. But while it's tempting to dismiss these fellow New Yorkers as an unimaginative formula band, they're also living a dream most people would kill for-making a career of being in a rock band. They're not out to redefine music, and they don't aim to blow minds, but try as you might, you will be humming their music when you return home after a long night out.

Meanwhile, Calla's psyched at their current success, and they've got no plans to stop anytime soon.

"You try to push it a certain amount, you try to put a certain emotion out there, a certain message across," Valle said. "It may seem very devastating or depressing, but there's a lot of spirit behind it, a lot of promise at the same time, a lot of hope. ... We have years and years left of building this."