Album Notes

"On their second album, "Toy Swords and Kalashnikovs", Perico continue to merge the childlike with the macabre. There are drums, sometimes shuffling, sometimes hurtling towards us from the audio middle distance. There are cornets and trumpets flying around somewhere just over our heads, sounding like grizzled ghosts who've drunk themselves into the ether around about the turn of the 19th century. There are dulcimers, spindly and isolated, and yet radiating a kind of detached wonder. And there are stories in miniature, as songs always should be, relayed to us via vocalist Matt Cameron, of errant soldiers and lost children, of dissipated lovers and decimated fathers, of nights of the town and mornings on the edge. Something akin to hearing a novel jump from the page and spring to life. Something else in the DNA of this album seems to emanate more form the Eastern Bloc than the hispanic inflections of their debut. But this album, unlike so many of its new folk contempoararies, doesn't outstay its welcome, closing with the imperious drawl of "Lo", an eight minute carousel whose instruments chart a seemingly never ending ascent. It's a pretty special album."

Joseph Malborn, Noise Makes Enemies Magazine