Giant Sand
Swerve

Swerve: deviation.

Howe Gelb is someone who has always done whatever the hell he wanted in his career. His early works injected the folk legacy with guitar riffs spawned from Hendrix and punk: tracks like "Thin Line Man" imprint themselves on your heart like a loved woman lost in memories. Ten years later, the guitarist-multi-instrumentalist-composer turned to *lo-fi* and signed a collection of homemade tracks ("Hisser") along with friends, colleagues, and ex-wives (truly); just before, he enjoyed improvising 25 minutes of live psych-country suites in the splendid "Backyard Barbeque Broadcast".

A true ordered maelstrom, an oxymoron indicating that particular creative agitation as free as it is anchored to fairly classic tracks (always the usual American folk). In 1990, Gelb and his Giant Sand give birth to this challenging "Swerve": a work that jumps from country, gets bogged down in noise and free jazz, alternating gritty rock, classic ballads, and disjointed interludes. "Can't Find Love" opens the dance: rolling bass, noises, and a duet of voices; it continues with "Swerver" that smells of pure avant-garde; we return to rock tracks with "Sisters And Brothers"... and so on, up to the 8 minutes of "Every Grain Of Sand", a true masterpiece of a work as interesting as, perhaps, uncertain. The same uncertainty that will push the artist to propose the almost-art rock of "Chore Of Enchantment" in contrast with the more recent "Tucson: A Country Rock Opera" which marks a return to the semi-acoustic, to the roots.

The sound waves that accompany the ship framed in the splendid cover deviate it from the path of musical convention, towards shores touched by few.

Perhaps Gelb has never known which path to take, leaving pieces of gems in his wake that are worth more than a career.