Giant Sand
Provisions

LA RECENSIONE

Music increasingly nocturnal for the "Last," a bit undone, and leaning poorly and solitary at the bar of the "Giant Sand" in Tucson, Arizona, smoky, frequented by unsavory characters, and nearing the morning closure.

It's almost dawn, while here, at the "Sand Giant," its waiters are yellowed and tired like their aprons, and its "girls," disillusioned by bleak life and meager earnings, who no longer have anyone to offer or ask anything from, without any regret.

At its tables, alongside its patrons, you can hear sounds increasingly roots, increasingly American, less and less electric, tainted with jazz fragments, blues bursts, swing handfuls, snippets of elusive psychedelia, and moments of border music, melancholic, damned, and elusive.

Everything flows slow and oblique inside those premises, thanks to the "crooner" Howe Gelb, who, accompanied by a cohesive Group of old Friends, evokes frugal and frayed stories, sipping bourbon in front of that bar, while everything, smoky and dirty, is nearing closure, people and things included.

You're surely on the right track when you choose, ready to make them play, the stories of a beautiful Album like this, because thanks to its tales, you're just steps away from the desert, the one overlooking this dusty bar, where its musical spirit hangs over your private life in not even a slightly veiled manner, because this rock is like the desert that enters your soul dirty, unsettling you badly.

If you think all this isn't true, even if incredulous, come with me because, as a good regular of its interiors, I will guide you step by step into the disenchanted stories of the "Giant Sand," told while drinking bourbon, and now magnificently transferred into this "Provisions" with its magnificent desert mix, leaving a bit of its dusty sand on you...

So much dark magic as when, while the truck drivers, after the night, are once again ready to put their gigantic five axles back on the road, you hear Our Own, together with Isobel Campbell sing the restless "Stranded Pearl", or when you hear Our Generous Gelb, together with his Friends, plays the notes of the caressing "Pitch & Sway", the compelling "Without A Word", or the fascinating "The Desperate Kingdom Of Love," a beautiful cover of Pj Harvey.

I conclude here, dedicating this "writing" to those who do not know enough about the Songwriter from Tucson, and are about to discover and enjoy the musical graces of this rich "Provisions," still so new today...