Califone + William Tyler

The past few years have been pretty good to Califone, whose ragged junkyard art-blues keeps creeping ever closer to a breakthrough. Still, as much as we're rooting for bigger things for a band this ingenious, we admit it's pretty well suited to cozy clubs like Lincoln Hall, where the magic of its distinctive musical alchemy is laid bare for all to see. William Tyler picks and plucks his expansive electric folk top open, adding amber waves of reverb to a big, lonesome sound. I swear I hear "Paint It Black" in "The Geography of Nowhere," off his latest for Merge, Impossible Truth.