Howe Gelb Giant Sand Waltz Again
"You are and then much like the river …/Beautiful, twisted and blueish/You appear to be here forever/But really are just passing through/The river here is ancient/But the waters are always new"
Giant Giant Sand's Tucson features music for a country rock opera written past Howe Gelb. It'south the story of a swain who leaves his home and sets out on a road trip in the desert, the series of adventures that follow teaching him something near life. Information technology starts with a waltz and ends with a Tom Waits-like blues yarn, and between times is filled with as many musical happenings as those of the story. Gelb's narrative blurs the line betwixt dreams and reality, so the borders the chief graphic symbol falls foul of may be personal or they may exist physical, the saloon bar where he falls in love may or may non be existent and the boondocks he comes across seems uncannily like to one he merely left behind… Information technology'due south more most how nosotros can view things differently: in other words, a journey of discovery. There's also a surreal season, with messages written in pebbles, rivers that run backwards, dancing saguaro cactii… one suspects something in the cactus juice, and any passing resemblance to the author in the "semi grizzled man with overt boyish naïveté", is I'm sure purely coincidental…
Howe Gelb often steps exterior of musical conventions to follow his heart. The rolling membership of the Giant Sand project is a testament to his gratuitous spirit and collaborative ethos, the just ii constants in the band being Gelb himself and his adopted dwelling in Tucson, Arizona. Like their distant "cousins" Calexico, Giant Sand draw on an Mexican-American heritage with a Cumbia fashion of playing that fuses African and South American traditional music, but besides embraces Americana, country rock and the blues.
Now, on his latest project, the desert troubadour Gelb has returned with an expanded line-up (and name), including musicians from both his orbits, Tucson, Arizona, and Aarhus in Kingdom of denmark. Giant Behemothic Sand's Tucson is a musical homage to the band's desert dwelling. Gelb had had the thought for a stone opera much earlier just it all came together over a musical appointment in Berlin terminal year when commissioned artists jammed on a desert theme, the project snowballing until he realized he had enough material for a double album. Rather like Neil Young's Greendale, the songs on Tucson are proficient enough to stand on their own, but the storyline gives the music a cinematic quality which tweaks the interest, and Gelb obliges by providing copious sleeve notes with stage directions.
Tucson is ambitious, with the assembled musicians having to draw on many different styles to provide the necessary musical backdrop to events unfolding in the story. Country-tinged opener 'Air current Blown Waltz' is a smart prelude and leads into signature tune 'Forever And A Twenty-four hours', full of adolescent swagger equally the main character departs, singing "Goodbye Suckers, I'll exist on my style" with the townsfolk replying, encouragingly, "Evict loser". It'south 1 of Tucson's more upbeat moments, very much like Calexico or Beirut with the mariachi trumpet and accordion, our hero full of optimism as he rides off into the sunset on a bicycle. The American bluegrass or country music moments on the album range from upbeat guitar-chugging songs like 'Thing Like That' (very reminiscent of Johnny Greenbacks'south 'I Walk The Line') to slower ballads like 'Plain Of Existence'. Gelb renders 'Love Comes Over You' with an exquisite Hank Williams warble, and romance is heavy in the air on sultry jazz duet with Lonna Kelley 'Ready Or Not'.
Elsewhere, there are flamenco influences, like on feisty 'The Song Belongs To You' and the wonderful Cumbia 'Caranito', the musical catalyst for the original project in Berlin. There's probably a debt owed somewhere along the fashion to Tom Waits: certainly 'Slag Heap' has that feel of the Marc Ribot and Rain Dogs-era Waits, and on terminal duet with Kelley 'Not The End Of The World' with its lovely warm trumpet and piano, he doesn't audio a million miles from Lou Reed'due south 'Perfect Twenty-four hours'. Gelb's mission has ever been to mix things up and he keeps on the right side of pastiche by being warm and 18-carat. Credit also due to the Danish string players who sound like they're playing their hearts out, with special mention to fiddlers Asger Christensen and Iris Jakobsen, and Maggie Bjorkland, who proves once again you tin never take too much pedal steel in this kind of stuff.
Giant Giant Sand are road-testing the new material at select festivals in Europe this summer, presumably equally a precursor to fleshing the projection out into a full-blown opera. Tucson certainly has commercial entreatment, some solid songs fusing dissimilar musical styles and describing a journeying of the heart in a modernistic-day setting – the oversupply scenes and confusion at the end are particularly poignant with last year's Arab Spring in mind. At that place's a part in which the main character is gazing over the bar longingly at a waitress, well-nigh to fall in love … just she'south reading Sartre's The Age Of Reason and behind her there are cactii dancing under mirror assurance. The surrealist elements probably ensure Howe Gelb'south opera will never brand the West Terminate or Broadway, but show its writer following his heart again, searching for some existential truth in the Arizona desert.
Source: https://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/albums/giant-giant-sand-tucson-99180
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