Calexico -- "Frontera"
It's hard to decide on a representative track from Calexico, but "Frontera" has most of the qualities you'd expect from this outfit. There is Joey Burns' heavily reverbed electric guitar (with tremolo, to boot), John Convertino's nimble and precise drumming (along with some other percussion), some steel guitar, some organ, some vibes, and other miscellaneous clatter -- and, of course, the horn section. Without the last of these -- the horns -- the vision would simply not be complete. As it is, everything fits: it's surf, it's jazz, it's mariachi, all experimental. Even before I heard Joey Burns say it in an interview, it was pretty clear what the band was after: to make a whole genre out of Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire." Cash himself said that the idea for the horns came to him in a kind of vision. The vision reached fruition in that song, and then again decades later in Calexico's sound.
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