Cover Magazine

by

Giant Sand

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I attended the Giant Sand show on Easter night in San Francisco and I felt the show was spectacular as is this new record, Cover Magazine. Each of the previous dozen times I've seen Howe & co.(Giant Sand, Calexico, Friends of Dean Martinez, Richard Buckner)live over the last seven years has been amazing and revelatory. All expectations and assumptions must be set aside when approaching Howe Gelb's live shows and recorded work. Howe Gelb is a multi-instrumental genius who has forgotten more about music than most musicians will ever learn. In fact, I would categorize Howe as more of a performance artist than simply a musician. If you think you'd enjoy hearing impromptu sound effects added to songs such as playing a piano by plucking the strings from the inside and causing distortion by putting the microphone inside the drum kit then you will like Giant Sand. When I first saw Howe live back in '96 I already owned fifteen of his records and he didn't play a single song with which I was familiar and he still blew me away! Howe is a complex artist/musician who is constantly changing and evolving. You will never attend a live show of Howe Gelb, Giant Sand, Calexico, etc. and hear a song played the way it was recorded on their commercial releases, or even hear the same song played the same way twice! Like any experimenting, jamming, free-form jazz band, this isn't a bad thing. They do not tour, or record, to regurgitate cookie cutter versions of their greatest hits to please the shallow pop music fan. Cover Magazine, like all of Howe's recorded work and live shows, is a slice of ethereal sonic time, captured like a photograph and never to be reproduced. Unexpected, sometimes discordant, sometimes inaccessible, idiosyncratic, off-the-wall, rough, turbulent, confusing - yes, these terms can all be used to describe Cover Magazine. However, I would be more prone to use terms such as "complex", "challenging", "intelligent", "horizon expanding", "exciting", "moody", "instinctual", "stimulating", "evolutionary", "eclectic", "personal", "strangely beautiful", "wryly humorous" , etc.

If you love Calexico, an exceptional band led by the amazing Joe Burns and John Convertino and deserved of all their recent success, check out their long time sage, Howe Gelb, via Giant Sand's Cover Magazine.

Giant Sand has been very prolific over the years. Most of their releases, while being quite uneven in terms of quality, contain some gems. A few, such as Swerve, Ramp, Chore, and especially The Love Songs and Center of the Universe, are real keepers.

Cover Magazine falls into the first category. You can't fault Gelb for his choice of covers, however the performances are quite uninspired with Gelb half-heartedly mumbling the lyrics over joyless, sun-baked, cocktail loungey-music---a style that seems to be Gelb's latest muse. It worked on Chore of Enchantment. It worked on the OP8 project with Lisa Germano. It doesn't work here, despite support from the likes of PJ Harvey and members of Grandaddy

I've seen Giant Sand do some of these covers live and they are quite exciting when given the full rock treatment. Why strip them down so as to render them practically unlistenable?

The final three tracks were recorded live and they almost salvage the release, especially a great version of Blue Marble Girl from Gelb's solo release Confluence.