Giant Sand
Valley of Rain

A black and white cloudy sky. A barren landscape, dotted with cactus and creosote bushes. This is what Howe Gelb (a native of Pennsylvania) shows us on the strictly black-bordered cover of the first album by Giant Sand (from Tucson, Arizona, like Green On Red and Naked Prey).

Recorded in just a few days and with a budget of only four hundred dollars, Valley of Rain is a brilliant and jagged melting pot of post-punk, garage rock, country, and blues.

Valley of Rain is more direct and harder than the dusty and offbeat sound that would become the trademark of Giant Sand and is distantly related to the California Paisley Underground and the desert sound - scorching the skin and burning the soul - of Green On Red, Thin White Rope, and Naked Prey. These latter bands, like Giant Sand, are at least in part, offspring of Neil Young, with his whining voice and his overwhelming and ramshackle guitar technique.

"Down On Town/Love's No Answer," "Black Venetian Blind," "Curse Of A Thousand Flames," "Man Of Want" are wonderfully abrasive electric rides; they are garage rock and post-punk intertwined in a vibrant, adrenaline-fueled, and odd jumble; they are Gun Club and Dream Syndicate dancing a jig arm in arm.

The splendid "Artists" and "Valley of Rain" are, however, country-folk-rock ballads, both elegiac and vigorous. "Tumble And Tear" returns to the explosive sound of a punk-blues steamroller, while "October Anywhere," neurotic and aching, dances on the superb alternation of syncopated rhythms dictated by bass and guitar, until it slips into the exhilarating sarabande of "Barrio," a Hispanic neighborhood where "I don't have nothing at all" and "The girls usually become whores", initially present only in the cassette version, and which I had on a Flexi disc (if you know what I'm talking about) released as a supplement to who-remembers-which specialized magazine. "Death, Dying and Channel 5," along with the previous two, forms a triptych of exciting urban-western-rock stories told with passion and in which the young Lou Reed resonates.

Valley of Rain, featuring bassist Scott Garber and drummers Tom Larkins and Winston A. Watson Jr., has stood well the test of time. The rusty melody and Gelb's voice, more guttural and less shrill compared to later albums, contribute to making this album sound decidedly young and inspired.

Valley of Rain is the first album in a substantial discography that is almost always of excellent quality, but remains - for enthusiasm, urgency, and compositional freshness - the unsurpassed masterpiece of Giant Sand in which Howe Gelb tells of a valley of rain where, under the cloudy sky and among the giant cacti, dangerous shadows and solitary coyotes roam.