Calla takes Bedhead's version of flatlands bluegrass and turns it into darkly colored New York City rock music. The slowly unfolding arrangements, the trudging tempos, and the sad, nondescript vocals are reproduced fairly faithfully. The difference is in the production and guitar sound. While Bedhead could have existed in a purely acoustic world, Calla is electric only; the guitar must be affected, debris must be added in post production, and the drums must be more upfront. Calla's third full length, Televise, is only slightly different than its predecessors, and that difference is that these dissimilarities between Calla and Bedhead are emphasized, meaning the sound is slightly more rock.
Televise has three really great songs and about six or seven songs that seem to fly by between the three really great songs. The album opens with one of those great songs, "Strangler." The song alternates between instrumental and vocal passages, the instrumental passages building the tempo with a great searing guitar solo, and the vocal passages smoothing it out and slowing it down, moaning the lyrics "I can get the same effect if you strangle me." "Don't Hold Your Breath" is more sparse and low-key, the most prominent instrument being shakers through large portions of the song. Like all great slowcore songs, it all comes together in the end, the guitar taking over the song as the vocals are hushed and echoed in the background. "Televised" starts off highly rhythmic, almost like a This Heat song. However, the heart of the song is in a sweeping guitar passage that is injected in the middle of the rhythmic rumble, and then revisited again in the songs extended outro. The rest of the album is serviceable but unremarkable. "Monument" offers an enjoyably clanging, church-bell-like guitar line. "Customized" plods along at a steady beat, surrounded by a dust-storm of effects and noise. "Surface Scratch" is almost a country vocal performance, with its minimal accompaniment.
Comparing Calla to a more rock version of Bedhead begs the question, "What about The New Year?" After the Kadanes reformed as The New Year, Bedhead fans were pretty evenly divided as to whether their new rock sound was something just as good or plain old awful. I'd expect the same divide in assessing Calla. While some will see Calla as something as unoriginal as Interpol, others will just dig the songs, and not worry about it so much.
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