Aus dem englischen Word Magazine (October issue). Ein Artikel über „Americana“. Hätte wohl auch in den Calexico-Thread gepasst:
„When Mercury Rev made it big, Howe Gelb of Giant Sand was living in Arizona and had already been making his own Americana — country-rock with almost as much jazz and blues and a kind of peyote psychedelia thrown in — for a decade and a bit. But 1998 was significant for his rhythm section, guitarist/singer Joey Burns and drummer John Convertino, as it was then that they put out The Black Light, their first album with spin-off band Calexico. It was the record that set Calexico’s signature sound: an imaginary Western soundtrack with mariachi horns, purposefully brushed drums and half-spoken tales of outlaws and chiquitas — all slightly tongue in cheek, more Sergio Leone than John Ford. Carried to Dust sticks close to the template — disappointingly close, since on their last album, 2006’s Garden Ruin, they seemed to be about to develop into something more than the sum of their parts, writing about their own times (or rather, those of George W Bush) and melding their musical influences together.
Still, these guys really know how to bed down a mood, and by that measure Carried to Dust is a great trip. Languorous duet Slowness is so perfectly sultry you may find yourself wanting to run off to Tijuana with singer Pieta Brown, while Sarabande, no more than a guitar figure and some pattering drums over 40 seconds, is so atmospheric it opens up a whole desert vista in the imagination.
The problem is, it’s all just a little too faceless, which is not something that could ever be said about the music of their former bandleader, Gelb. When Calexico started doing better than Giant Sand, Gelb’s reaction was in the spirit of Mark E Smith’s quip, „If it’s me and your gran on bongos, it’s The Fall“: he went went off and hired some Danes to replace them. Provisions — his umpteenth album and certainly one of his most satisfying — rather proves the strength of his musical personality, even though, as ever, it’s largely him fiddling around over bass and drums.
Success for Giant Sand can often be no more than reaching the end of a track without falling apart, and Gelb’s always happy to mess up a gentle love song with some sloppy and deafening fuzz-guitar solo or an impromptu ramble on a piano. But if he’s hard to live with, he’s easy to love — his voice is so lazy, raw and rich that you can tell what he’s on about even without taking in a word, and he can sure set that tumble-weed rolling through the canyons of your mind. What’s more, at his best, as on this album’s The Desperate Kingdom of Love with its funereal trumpets, steel guitar and stately piano framing a message of sympathy to a heartbroken „sickly child“, he doesn’t just paint the big picture; his music is involving on a human, personal scale in a way that neither Calexico, with their third-person remove, nor Mercury Rev, with their IMAX-scale wonder, can be. After all, it can get awfully lonely out there in the great wide open.“
Autor: James Medd
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C'mon Granddad!