Daily Dose: Tim Rutili & Craig Ross, “The Day Before The Peaches Rot”

Daily Dose is your daily source for the song you absolutely, positively need to hear every day. Curated by the Paste Music Team.

In 2016, Califone member Tim Rutili and his friend Craig Ross released Guitars Tuned To Air Conditioners, a dreamy album that Rutili calls, “long form meditations on texture, electricity, tension and time.” On June 22nd, their follow up 10 seconds to collapse will be released on Jealous Butcher Records and, on it, the mood of their music is shifting. As Rutili puts it, “The songs swing somewhere between the poles of early 70’s AM radio pop and deconstructed folk songs built up from drones and loops (though, you may hear something else and use completely different words to describe this music).”

If you can’t imagine that sound in your head, the duo have released a video today that will clear up any confusion. Musically speaking, at least. The song “The Day Before The Peaches Rot” is a psych-blues excursion, not too far afield from some of Califone’s best work, but with enough little grace notes and minor adjustments to make it feel like its own thing. Adding to it is the weird and wonderful video that tracks along with the surrealistic lyrics of the song as closely as possible. Here’s what Rutili had to say about it: “This kind of literalism usually works against all of my better instincts. Making this video with Cara Corder and her beautiful, frightening masks, Angela Bettis and George McAuliffe made me very happy. Sometimes the wrong thing to do is the most right thing to do. We are monsters.”

If you’d like to see these monsters in person, they have an album release show set for July 21st in Austin and will also be embarking on a living room tour that will take them from Dallas to Chicago.