Dear CANIDI,

I've gotten myself into a big mess, a huge mess! I promised a two-person review to a friend but had very little time to research a band unknown to me until a few days ago. Moreover, I faced chronic internet connection issues that almost entirely prevented me from learning about the group and listening to the album... It's a hassle living in the mountains!

The album was recorded by the band in 2004; the guys hail from Tucson, Arizona, a frontier land that opens the doors to the desert, a hot, unforgiving, endless place. Right away, it's easy for me to associate them with quintessential desert bands like Kyuss and Thin White Rope.

The cover is both a summary and an unsettling painting: a not-so-clear image showing skeletal trees, with a livid and dark sky on the horizon; a concrete threat of rain, a very rare event in a desert. Because the desert is indeed the image it tries to evoke: I have little doubt about it.

Their music is instrumental: rarefied, enveloping, penetrating deep within you. Like the track that gives the album its title: almost six minutes of a bitter song with an imposing, mysterious, sublime march. You reach the end but want to start again right away, forever; a warm shiver like the blazing desert sun. An unforgiving endless expanse, only rarely forgiving: this is the desert and, for me, these are the Friends of Dean Martinez.

I discover that the band consists of members from Calexico, Giant Sand, and Naked Prey and has been active for about twenty years: what have I missed in these decades!?! So, I must soon fill this gap, while thanking the person who wisely recommended them to me.

Sincerely, DE.

Dear DE,

We know well that promises must be kept! Who knows what was on your friend's mind when suggesting such an album, so outside today's music circuits, with such a particular name? Friends of Dean Martinez, the friends of Dean Martin, the Italian-American singer and actor, Dino Paul Crocetti. Bill Elm, Joey Burns, and John Convertino must have really loved him a lot, and perhaps, your friend must really care for you to introduce you to their wonderful music.

You say it right: desert, desert, desert. In "Random Harvest," the sun no longer beats down mercilessly at ninety degrees above our heads; we are at sunset, everything ignites, the color of baked earth takes over. We feel the warm air blowing around us, we see the shadows stretching like the cinematic sounds of Bill Elm's slide guitar.

In the album's eight tracks, we stray (but not too far) from the bright Morriconean western sound that any lover of good music and good cinema knows. We enter a hauntingly mysterious twilight zone, at times even dark. An album, music, a group to be enjoyed outdoors facing vast, majestic horizons. Whether it's the sea, your dear Alps, or even a stretch of cultivated fields, nothing changes. "Random Harvest" is a perfect soundtrack, and we are the solitary protagonists of a movie yet to be filmed.

What a strange coincidence, dear DE! Some time ago a friend recommended those Thin White Rope you mentioned in the writing. Another sound, decidedly more rock but with the same desert soul at its core. Two groups, two sides of the same coin, one more direct, the other more introspective, two worlds that, on a musical level, brush against and complete each other.

I haven't thanked him enough! Let's hold on tight to these friends who, these days, are rarer than a puddle of water... in the desert.

Faithfully, CANIDI.