Concept albums are notoriously fiendish undertakings. Most often they are an embarrassment, the sort of thing that artists blush about and PR reps write off as youthful indulgence.
If successful, however, the combination of narrative and music can be transforming. Lou Reed's "Berlin" (with a little help from David Bowie's "Heroes" and Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life") metamorphosed that city from a center of Nazi atrocities and Cold War conflict to an alluring melange of angsty countercultural cool.
Arizona group Calexico's "The Black Light" has done the same for the sleepy towns of the U.S.-Mexican border. Conjuring the musical equivalent of pulp fiction, "The Black Light" rewrites the dusty back roads and decayed tract housing into a beguiling otherworld. Angelic cholo sisters, bad drugs, urban scrawl and gun battles wash up against a musical soundscape of throaty steel guitars and melancholic accordion licks as "The Black Light" follows a young man's misadventures through the seamy, spicy world of Mexicali.