GIANT SAND
Is All Over… the Map
Thrill Jockey
· Can't quite argue with that, really.
Since his old Giant Sand cohorts Joey Burns and John Convertino went off and overshadowed his desert-bound mutterings with Calexico, Howe Gelb has at turns taken up the piano, disappeared for months to Scandinavia (re-emerging with last year's truly weird The Listener), re-super-grouped the Band of Blacky Ranchette (and brilliantly at that), and reclaimed the Giant Sand name as his own.
Backed and captured to tape by John Parish, All Over The Map lives up to its title, occasionally rollicking (check "Remote," with added yelps from Scout Niblett), more often good old-fashioned Gelb (at his finest with "Classico," which not only opens the proceedings beautifully, but gets reprised later on, re-sung by Vic Chesnutt and Henriette Sennenvalt). There's few finer soundtracks for your own wanderings than "Cracklin' Water" and "Les Forcats Innocents" – Gelb leaps from the Mojave to the South of France in a single bound and pulls off both equally well.
While it's easy to miss Burns and Covertino (few others can follow Gelb’s lead like they can – the new Giant Sand live is a bit of a shambles at times), Gelb's still writing some of his best songs. As long as he's around, everything will turn out just fine.
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