Houston expatriates Tom and Christina Carter of Charalambides are probably among the city’s most prolific non-blues musicians: Their band has averaged two full-length releases per year since they began playing 15 years ago. Still, the volume of their work is less noteworthy than its variety, quality and unbending commitment to pure music produced on the edge of complete obscurity. Slow, spacious and beautiful, Likeness is comprised almost entirely of electric guitar and voice, but it seems to exist in a cultural netherworld, a musical limbo populated with the shades of earthy folk, pagan rituals, medieval chants, Greek myth and New Age imagery. And despite Christina’s uncharacteristically heavy use of words in her hypnotic vocals, ostensibly in an effort to give the album an element of political protest, Likeness never becomes topical or even timely. This music transcends era and location, but is curiously, tragically bound up in the physical world, as in the duo’s ominous interpretation of the traditional song “Saddle Up My Pony”: Likeness‘s tremendous power comes from its evocation of a transcendence that is actually an imprisonment, a spiritual journey that ends in the isolation of the listener’s own imagination. It’s an intense, terrifying and unique experience for those who believe that popular music is as useful as high art for bringing the essential meanings of existence to light.
This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2007.