That's what's cool about Giant Sand frontman Howe Gelb, y'see. He's always willing to experiment -- fuck around with a new time signature, throw in a fragmented piano segment or mellotron solo, bring in Juliana Hatfield to add a couple of throwaway girlie vocals, distort everything, and move on. He's like the Tom Waits of alt-country. Except he doesn't growl and doesn't shout through vocoders and doesn't hunch menacingly over the bodies of dead, romantic couples... except when he does. I guess you don't release more than 20 albums over as many years without learning something on the way.
Giant Sand have always existed as a semi-mythical band for me. A rich, unfolding tapestry. An uneasy coalition between a few musicians and a cast of several thousand hangers-on. I remember when I first heard their name -- it was my first meeting with the Lemonheads, more specifically Evan Dando. He showed me the trick of whistling two notes at once; I whistled like a bird gargling. Doubtless, I asked him if his band came fully formed to the world, and doubtless, he owned up to having listened to some music sometime. The name that resonated then was Giant Sand -- a band lost in the middle of an Arizona desert highway, a band who carried the torch of Gram Parsons long before most folk realized there was even a flame that burned. I was impressed by the Lemonheads. I was in love with Dando's wastrel, tormented-rich-kid voice, but the name of Giant Sand hovered over everything he sang. It was like that scene in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the computer Deep Throat talks of the computer yet to come, one that it is not even fit to calculate its perimeters... or something.
I can't remember when I actually heard Giant Sand. They kinda crept up on me, like a fungoid growth -- a fungoid growth radiating soul and pedal steel guitars and a voice ravaged by the passing of time. Gradually, they seeped into my consciousness. There was a 1994 album, Glum, which made me feel anything but. There was a conversation I had with my ex-Melody Maker editor, in which he waxed lyrical about Howe Gelb's emotional floodwaters -- and he's a man who knows his tortured Midwestern artists, believe me. There was that incredible collaboration with Lisa Germano, OP8, which spawned one of 1997's finest albums, Slush... and a handful of live dates that gently rocked my foundations.
This isn't all Gelb does, though. A couple of years ago, while reviewing his solo album Hisser in The Stranger, I came up with one of those equations, much-loved by lazy music critics who once studied math at college. "If Lambchop + Pavement + solo Lou Barlow + solo Evan Dando + Palace + Whiskeytown + a slew of lesser pretenders = Hisser," I said, "then why are all the above rated higher than Gelb?" I realize that by pulling in such a heady, unwieldy equation I was resorting to hyperbole, but all I was attempting to convey was a certain measure of soul -- and a debt that most of those musicians owe to Giant Sand, which is rarely acknowledged in print. I wanted to point out that Gelb has a soulful integrity to what he does; there is a real heart and poignancy in the middle of all the maverick musical mischief and despair.
Whatever. All I know is that I have their new album, Chore of Enchantment, playing as I type these words, and that it's making me feel at ease with the world outside once more. Especially when Gelb starts sighing lines like "Last night I got wasted/So I could end the day/Old Joe Pena and I sat there well basted/Till the blur bar faded away."
It's not much. But it makes me happy.
