For those familiar with his twenty-year back catalog as Giant Sand, it’s strange to think of a young Howe Gelb growing up in Pennsylvania. There’s something so sun-damaged and craggy about his sprung, personal desert music that it seems as if Gelb should simply have emerged fully formed from the sands outside Tucson, Arizona. He’s a certifiable High Desert Weirdo, but on Giant Sand’s best records – 1994’s Glum and 2000’s Chore of Enchantment are my favorites – Gelb has worked with collaborators John Convertino and Joey Burns (who later formed the mighty, and somewhat similar, Calexico together) to create memorably smart, idiosyncratic and new-sounding music. Gelb’s ragged guitar squawks and raspy vocals have prevented Giant Sand’s music from achieving Calexico’s grand sweep, but his literate lyrics and textured, almost spoken delivery imbue Giant Sand’s best songs with unmistakable character. His tendencies – when at his worst – towards weird digressions, episodic interludes and self-indulgence have kept his work obscure. He seems to like it that way. He is, as I said, a High Desert Weirdo.
And sometimes, truth be told, Gelb’s work earns its obscurity. This is the case with Is All Over The Map, Gelb’s first record without Convertino and Burns in years, and – not counting a throwaway cover record a few years ago – his most undisciplined in a long while. Sadly, this is a case of being able to judge a book by its cover: Chore of Enchantment, besides being full of simple, beautiful songs and one of the most unpardonably slept-on records of the decade, was a good-looking album. All Over the Map, on the other hand, has the scrawled text and thrown-off layout that defines any number of ramshackle ’80s-vintage Giant Sand records. And, despite a few nice songs, the looks bear that out: All Over the Map is, indeed, all over the map. Exhaustingly so.
The absence of Burns and Convertino is deeply felt, here, although P.J. Harvey collaborator John Parish produced both records. Left to his own devices with a crew of new musicians, as on his solo records, Gelb has shown a tendency towards a raw, almost amateurish home-recorded sound. Where this personal sound adds to Gelb’s bare-bones retake on the heartbroken “Cracklin Water” (first sung by Lisa Germano on her 1998 collaboration with Giant Sand, under the name OP8), it leaves more complex songs like “NYC of Time” and “Fool” sounding manic and unfinished. Gelb’s songwriting also isn’t at its peak here: the album-opening “Classico” shows Gelb’s ruminative lyrical style to good advantage, but he (and almost anyone else) could do better than couplets like “N-Y-C/Spells Nick to Me,” which he drops on “NYC of Time.” Songs like “Remote” and “Fool” – which both quickly go from nicely ragged to almost totally unravelled – evince a lack of discipline. Others, like the French-language “Les Forcats Innocents” and the album’s numerous short instrumentals, simply slide by unremarkably. “Muss” is a passable throwback to Giant Sand’s sound of a decade ago: a bluesy foreground reverberant with background noise and vague-but-effective Gelb lyrics (my favorite: the whispered song-ender “paradise don’t come without mistakes”). All Over The Map’s best moment, arguably, comes on a song Gelb doesn’t even sing: a spare, scratchy reprise of “Classico” sung as a duet by Vic Chesnutt and Henriette Sennenvalt.
It’s arguable that no one but a Giant Sand fan would care enough about this record to even pick it up: it’s almost ostentatiously crappy looking, and formal coherence – within songs, between songs, and in general – is maddeningly absent. For other bands, a record this ragged would be a bad sign. For Howe Gelb, it’s just something that happens. Twenty years of records says it’ll all come right again, probably on the next record with 1) a photo on the cover and 2) Messrs. Convertino and Burns holding down the rhythm section.
|