It is an unwritten law that one of the great difficulties of keeping a band going is the varying commitment levels of its members. Even with small groups, duos or trios, the constantly shifting priorities and life goals of contributors can cause wrinkles in everything from tour plans to record deals. Someone decides to get married and their new spouse wants them to ‘grow up’ and get a more stable day job. Someone else decides to go back to school and pursue that architecture degree. Or someone else sees the band going in a new direction that you and the other members despise the very thought of. Eventually, you become frustrated enough to wonder why you bother making music in the first place, if all that time laboring in sweaty practice rooms and driving from town to town in smelly vans, sleeping on strangers’ couches, all for little pay and even less recognition, is at all worth it. If the bonds forged on stage are so tenuous as to be broken so easily, why do it at all? Every one of us who’s serious about performing has been there at one point or another.
England’s Her Name Is Calla have recently seen a shrinking in their membership, from a quintet to a core trio, and this has necessitated a change in sound, from the grand and darkly majestic to the more intimate and intricate, a towering clock paired down to a wristwatch working in miniature. Perhaps this re-shifting of trajectory has proven a good time for a retrospective, because Calla has now graced us with a sweeping two-disc overview of their always fascinating career.
The collection jumps around a bit in time, stampeding out of the gate with “A Moment Of Clarity’s” cold and triumphant Gothic burst, before eventually slipping back to 2008 album The Heritage and its measured, slow-burn intensity in pieces like “New England” and “Motherfucker! It’s Alive and It’s Bleeding”. Soon we shift forward again into more pastoral pieces from The Quiet Lamb such as “Pour More Oil” and the eerie tape warbles and lush strings of “Interval One”. Along the way there are lovely acoustic detours such as those from the Long Grass EP and the rarer A Blood Promise EP. But consistent throughout this collection is the stately grace of Sophie Green’s violin work, and the soaring, Thom Yorke-like anguished howls of lead vocalist Tom Morris. These have been the twin anchors of Calla throughout their blossoming career, and make them an instantly recognizable entity. These songs are no boilerplate faux-Godspeed clones.
There was, for a time, a renaissance of bands making this kind of stirring, elegiac post rock. But where Slowest Runner In All The World and Stubborn Tiny Lights eventually went bust and Calla countrymen Yndi Halda have kept us waiting for Album Two seemingly for eons, Her Name Is Calla remains a shifting, constantly adjusting unit, bending their will around the precious metals of their songs instead of breaking under pressure of real-world complications. Accordingly, this overview makes for more than just a convenient and immensely enjoyable starting point for those new to the band (though it is that), or a snapshot of where they’ve been in the various journeys of recent years. It also makes for a lasting testament to their unity, a document to the strength of numbers, of a band making epic music together and surviving epic reconfigurations, as well, and coming out shining on the other side. (Zachary Corsa)
a closer listen 