Giant Sand
(Fire Records
The über-prolific recording/releasing machine that is Giant Sand mainman Howe Gelb rolls on. Over the past year he's issued several records under his own name, including a flamenco guitar album called Alegrias (read our interview with Gelb about that project here) and the brand-new, pay-what-you-want download-only Melted Wires (details here). Meanwhile, he and his new label, Fire Records, have embarked upon an ambitious remaster/reissue program that started this fall with Giant Sand's 1985 debut Valley Of Rain plus 1986's Ballad of A Thin Line Man and 1988's Storm, the plan being to ultimately reissue 30 Sand/Gelb-related titles before the end of 2011.
In the middle of all this, then, arrives a fresh Giant Sand release, although it's hardly just another entry in a bulging Gelb discography that stretches back nearly three decades. In fact, at the risk of slipping into journalistic hyperbole, it's the strongest and most cohesive GS album since 2000's masterful Chore of Enchantment, and before that, 1992's blazing epic Center of the Universe, the title that helped bring Gelb to the attention of the flannel-clad denizens of the then-exploding alterna-nation. You can ascribe the aesthetic success of Blurry Blue Mountain to a number of things, from the actual tunes (featuring some of Gelb's most directly affecting lyrics in years, plus wonderfully fleshed-out arrangements) and their sequencing (which deftly balances the yin/yang of rockers and ballads, guitar-centric numbers and piano-based ones, to craft an aural journey of sorts); to the overall recording quality and the performances themselves.
The album was cut mostly in Denmark with Gelb's Danish group of musicians - Thøger T. Lund on bass, Peter Dombernowsky on drums, Anders Pedersen on slide and steel guitars and Nikolaj Heyman on guitar, plus Lonna Kelley on guest vocals - all clearly at home and in their element, playing with a mixture of relaxed determination and Gelb-approved free-wheeling abandon. These performances contain a palpable spark and spontaneity - check how the funky, bluesy "Brand New Swamp Thing," slips through alternate-dimension-like changes while retaining a definable, irresistible groove - yet it's clear that no one assembled in the studio did so with the expectations of zipping through a few takes then calling things "a wrap." Gelb, abetted by co-producer/engineer Kent Olsen, got everyone to zero in on the material's core, which is essentially a freeing exercise, and in doing so, bestowed implicit permission to the musicians to stretch their creative wings as they orbited the core. And yes, that's a kind of vague concept to put down on the printed page, but it's the best way I know to highlight the notion of a record's "vibe." If there's one thing about Giant Sand records, it's that each has its own specific vibe. Blurry Blue Mountain's shimmers and shivers in the best possible way.
It's also quintessential Gelb, who meditates at length upon the vicissitudes, good and bad, of getting older and how that changes one's perspective in both subtle and profound ways. Right from the get-go, with opening track "Fields of Green," he sings about transitioning into his fifties and expresses amazement over how he's sometimes viewed now by younger musicians ("They've been killing off all my heroes since I was 17... the bleeding trailblazers... Now I'm approached by those in need of reminder, confusing me with path finder..."). This theme resurfaces several times over the course of the album, such as in "Erosion" in which the "reaper" checks in to see "how you're holdin' on/ and how much of you is already gone"), although it's counterbalanced by a series of testimonials about how finding and holding on to a true love is what nurtures the soul, and how love and family are what ultimately count. "Now kiss your girl/ Like it's the last time/ Now kiss your kid/ Like it's the last time," is the timely message in "The Last One," while in "Spellbound" Gelb utters one of his most memorable, and timeless, lines ever: "When you're in love with a beautiful woman... there inside her whisper is a lyric that can't be forgotten."
As is the songwriter's habit, little musical flourishes and lyric asides dot the songs. For example, early in "Fields of Green" he whisper-sings into the mic, "There's a kind of hush/ All over the world, all over the world," as if he'd just noticed that the gentle guitar melody he'd been plucking out resembles the progression in the early ‘60s Herman's Hermits hit "There's A Kind of Hush (All Over the World)"; elsewhere in another song, he namechecks both Merle Haggard and Thunderclap Newman, not necessarily because either artist is particularly relevant to the song's narrative but possibly because a few lines earlier he'd sung the words "underneath the thunder clappin'" and it seemed like a nice way to bring some symmetry into the lyrics. If you're a longtime Gelb watcher, it's odd and serendipitous moments like this that add to the overall delight.
It doesn't hurt, either, that the songs, already strong, grow stronger with each successive listen. Among the best tracks: "Thin Line Man," originally a thumping garage-rock number appearing on Ballad of a Thin Line Man, is here remade into a psychedelic spaghetti western epic; "Chunk of Coal," with its Floyd Cramer-like piano line, is honky-tonk-worthy country jazz; "Better Man Than Me" picks up a similar thread as "Thin Line Man," a churning, throbbing slice of noirish space rock featuring a ferocious guitar duel; and 7 ½ minute "Monk's Mountain," with its twangy, tremolo-flecked riffs, undulating boxcar rhythm and part-muttered, part-crooned vocals, is an eleventh-hour entry for Year's Best Americana Song. As noted above, the sequencing of the tunes is key; at times in the past, a Giant Sand album has been just as likely to meander as to progress, which isn't necessarily a bad thing of course, but for Blurry Blue Mountain there's a steady, purposeful sense of forward motion, and like the comment about "vibe" above, it's a perceptual thing that's nevertheless very much real.
"Real" it is, then, daddy-o. You're invited to come climb Giant Sand's blurry blue mountain. The closer you get, the more in focus things start to become.
DOWNLOAD: "Monk's Mountain," "Thin Line Man," "Fields of Green" FRED MILLS
