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Arizona Amp and Alternator “Arizona Amp and Alternator”(Thrill Jockey 2005) Review by David Cowling 
A Howe Gelb by any other name is still a Howe Gelb record. For a band that proclaims it hasn’t any members there are some pretty impressive players here – aside from Howe, Scout Niblett, M. Ward, Grandaddy, and even Jeremy Gara of Arcade Fire put in appearances. It’s one of those Howe records where he rerecords old songs, in this case ‘Where the Wind Turns the Skin to Leather’ (given a gentle strummed strung out feel, where the guitars are not so much strummed as caressed), ‘Blue Marble Girl’ (this time a faithful guitar noses around the vocal, keyboards add texture and the drums propulsion and depth – it’s a gentle tissue wrapped version [besides the dub piano]) and the perennial favourite ‘Loretta and the Insect World’ (with mainly female vocals turning it into a sexy Black Widow of a song, luring you in and weaving its magic web around you). For good measure there are a couple of cover versions – Traffic’s ‘Low Spark of the High Heeled Boys’ and with some absolutely seductive vocals by Marie Lorette Friis, a sensual slinky syncopated ‘Baby Its Cold Outside’. In a typically perverse move, there are four versions of the title song, from the bare minimalist 1 with flourishes of Mexicali guitar, a low key 2 that uses 1 as a template and leaves more space, no flourishes, the drought version, 3 compresses everything and adds some old-time vocal harmonies (sounds like M. Ward) to the countrified 4 that sounds like a Band of Blacky Ranchette version complete with coyote yowls of pedal steel. Without the Calexico rhythmic axis, it gives Howe a bit more freedom to meander away from the straight and narrow – the opening ‘Velvet and Pearl’ has the usual late-period Howe, with ramshackle sound and vocals that seem as though they are extemporised – a melody that follows like a faithful donkey through whatever country you drag it through. ‘Man on a String’ adds further to the thought that Howe is becoming a kind of John Ford figure who deals in the iconic possibilities of his chosen genre, playing around with convention. He’s a complete master able to take the basics and improvise around it , the choice being whether or not you’re willing to follow where he takes you. Here the guitar sounds like it was picked up in a junk store – no tuning and matched against saloon piano, with Howe’s well-worn vocals juxtaposed with Henriette Sennenvaldt’s vocal beauty, leaving some seemingly new kind of configuration, though the trick is as old as the hills. The record finishes in more experimental mode, built around the wood block drumming of Jeremy Gara – with almost spoken word vocals, the music lurches around, squeals of painful guitar, verses of moist romantic lyricism seeming almost a cathartic experience. As the song moves from the darkness into the light, the tone lightens and we’ve completed another journey with Howe, one full of short-cuts, cul-de-sacs, repetitions, break-neck chases and leisurely cruises. Sure, you get lost and side-tracked every now and then, but whenever the horn blows I’ll come running.
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