GIANT SAND - It’s All Over… The Map

There's a bit of desert in Denmark... From the dust of Tucson to the chill of Copenhagen, Giant Sand surprisingly reincarnate as a new band of Danish musicians, still under the knowing guidance of longtime leader Howe Gelb. And so, despite the band's declared breakup in the wake of "Cover Magazine" in 2002, and despite the departure of Joe Burns and John Convertino, now fully devoted to their Calexico, here come Giant Sand taking the shape of Anders Pedersen on guitar, Thøger T. Lund on bass and Peter Dombernowsky on drums, all of whom had already stood by Gelb's side on his latest solo outing, "The Listener".

Giant Sand, after all, have always really been Gelb's own private affair: ever since their epic debut in the mid-Eighties with "Valley Of Rain" and "Ballad Of A Thin Line Man", there's no counting the times the band's lineup has been shaken up, bending each time to the moods of its creator. And by now Gelb feels right at home in Denmark, ever since he married the Danish Sofie Albertsen, who on this occasion too stands beside her husband as vocalist.

Yet it's just as hard to shake an initial sense of estrangement at imagining that music as deserty and American as Giant Sand's could be born in the heart of old Europe... And yet one shouldn't be surprised, because this new "Is All Around... The Map" presents itself, right from the title, as a genuine travel diary, a varied collection of notes jotted down along the road that runs from an edgy New York to the woods of Heidelberg, passing through a France as bitter as the verses of Villon and a Naples with an atmosphere more tropical than Mediterranean.

At certain moments, there's no denying it, the absence of Burns and Convertino's class is sorely felt: it's hard to replicate the oblique magic of a gem like "Chore Of Enchantment" without that alchemy which time had by then forged between the two Calexico members and Howe Gelb. Despite this, though, Giant Sand, aided also by the contribution of old friend John Parish, continue to produce a sound that's both traditional and unmistakable at the same time, crafting a set of songs that are more direct and less unpredictable than in the past, yet still rich in nuance and detail, managing to escape the temptation to scatter into the fragmentation of Gelb's solo work.

The journey opens with "Classico", from territory bordering closely on the less intimate side of Lambchop, joined by brief bursts of Grandaddy-style dissonance, before stopping off in the spaghetti-western terrain of "Napoli" and the bossa nova temptations of "Les Forçats Innocents", with Gelb showing off an improbable French accent.

In between, there's room for the dry, Dylan-esque blues of "Muss" and the guitar-drenched one of "Remote", on which Gelb plays at channelling Jon Spencer. And alongside the poppy charms of "Fool", Giant Sand also indulge in a sparkling rock number like "Flying Around The Sun With Remarkable Speed", which is essentially the song The Strokes and co. might write if, for a moment, Lou Reed could lend them a gram of his genius.

Ballads like "Cracklin' Water" and "Hood (View From A Heidelburg Hotel)" wouldn't have looked out of place on "Chore Of Enchantment", with those jagged guitars and that deep cowboy voice ready to tell his own story by the campfire. Only the instrumental interlude of "Drab" and the closing coda of "Ploy", cut off literally with a snip of the scissors, sound genuinely dispensable, while "Anarchistic Bolshevistic Cowboy Bundle", with its odd, ramshackle mash-up of the Sex Pistols' "Anarchy In The U.K." and placid country music, is exactly the kind of madness one should always expect from someone like Gelb.

Until, all of a sudden, in the reprise of the opening "Classico", out comes the intensity-laden voice of Vic Chesnutt, accompanied by what at first listen would seem to be none other than Björk… the credits reveal it's actually Henriette Sennenvalt instead, but what remains certain is that, with travelling companions like these, you really wish the road would never end…

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14/12/2006