HOWE GELB
The listener
LP/CD, Thrill Jockey
After
listening to the first two tracks of Howe Gelb’s new album I knew I had a
wonderful masterpiece right there in front of me. And after I was done
listening to the whole thing, I turned it around and but it right back on.
Because “the listener” starts off with a beautiful piece of introductory
music, piano and string-section interwoven in a melody that is two parts
tv-show-romanticism and two parts real melancholia from classical
(soundtrack-)composers. Moreover, who dares to do introductory tracks on his
album nowadays? Next on is “felonius” in which Howe Gelb sings in a
voice imitating Lou Reed over a piano-line imitating on of Lou Reed’s the
following words: “The piano is stealing Lou Reed licks / licks that he
probably stole / wish they were Duke Ellington’s / like I wish we never
got old”. I will know you are one of the good people, if you get the
fabulous humour in that. Or in a line like “you can bummle up your own
birthday party / by coming one year late” in “Lying there”, another
definite Lou Reed-rip off. Oh yeah, and he is serious in that. Remember what
Niels Bohr said: “It can only be true, if you can laugh about it.” Or
did he say: “The opposite of a small truth is wrong. The opposite of a big
truth is also true”? I get a little confused at times.
There
are a lot of songs on “the listener” that are true Howe Gelb style. I
can’t describe what that is exactly, but listening to it, you start to
think about, how he will take these short little melodies,
chord-progressions and lines apart from each other in a live-show and put
them back together again in new and mysterious ways, that always seem to
come at the right time and place and no one knows how or where from. And
“the listener” features a lot of these little bricks and parts that Howe
Gelb will build and fuse into songs, epics and more fragments within a
split-second.
Those
among the listeners of “the listener” who are still bemoaning the demise
of Giant Sand, will also get a few tracks to pacify them. Though funnily
they are those where Joey
Burns and John Convertino aren’t playing on, but rather songs
like “Now I lay me down”. Maybe there is a little more jazz on side A
and a little more experiment and avantgardism on side B than on his recent
records. Maybe there are more “real” songs, as judged by song-structure
and line / chorus / line / chorus – exchanges. Then again, on a song like
“B 4 U” he confronts the listener with almost harmolodic (see The Royal
Trux) structures via distorted guitars, disfigured rhythms and jangly
melodies. Right after that is “The Nashville Sound”, a soft, purely
acoustic song with straight melody and the typical, whispered, gruntled
singing of Howe Gelb. I guess, you get the picture of him putting a lot of
stuff next to each other, that might come as a surprise but don’t really,
because you know you are listening to a record by Howe Gelb. That is his
artistic achievement, this dialectic of opposing things, which runs right
through the whole record, without sacrificing beautiful songs such as
“Blood Orange” (with Marie Frank) or the compactness of the whole album
at the same time. Because, even though “the listener” was recorded in
various places, from Arizona to Denmark with a little Texas and Italy
in-between, with the help of various people in various time-zones, it still
feels very compact and whole. My theory: Howe Gelb has grown his very own
style to such great extent that he is able to incorporate local differences
naturally and organically, and that makes him unique and special. And the
proof is easy to come by: whenever it is a song or recording by Howe Gelb,
you’ll instantly hear that, because he is so unique in his style. From the
diverse time-shifts within the songs to the singing and melodies and the
humour, Howe Gelb is to me the epitomization of the Southern artist.
