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giant giant sand was formed by nature one imploding evening on stage, probably berlin .. maybe vevey  .. and since then an album has amassed tween the scatter of christmas and the tickle of a new year’s eve ... besting not to insult that nature before the gifted year would have already made its escape  ..  then, once the songs were culmed, twere shaken up and tossed out across the kitchen table  ..  a pattern was discernable in their sprawl  .. ... a story line was then thread to connect them in hopes it might assist in the short attention span of our youth and the onslaught of dementia for the rest of us  .. .  since no available spoken word was stitched in to such a lining of this coat of songs, an opera plopped outa her .. not a propera .. a popera  of country rock proportions thanks to pedal steel  with an open door policy to any passing cumbia  ... thanks in no small part to the influx of the young bloods now in tow hailing from the city of tucson itself, the band now bloated with members 30 years the junior of such senior membership as well as the rapidly encroaching middle age of the danes still in cluster from the last 10 years  .. . and the sonic embrace of lonna up the road from phoenix, and maggie from copenhagen too.
though the story line is handed out in 3 parts .. it should be noted it is intended only as a part of the entertainment factor to bolster the drab world of liner notes .. and not a necessary thing for the listener part part 1: the setting and the allure of escape part 2: the tangle of love part 3: the community and its endurance all parts set to the time line of here and 12 minutes from now while the world shrugs us off a bit
perhaps best to have the new york times best offer the clarity of their fine writership :
GIANT GIANT SAND. “Tucson” (Fire)
An amiable improbability has sustained Howe Gelb’s band Giant Sand since 1983. Based in Tucson, Giant Sand grounds its music in the country-and-Mexican heritage of the Southwest, although the longtime core of the band hails from Denmark, and Mr. Gelb has, through the years, dipped into flamenco, psychedelic rock, punk and other noisy whims.
For “Tucson,” Mr. Gelb added six more musicians to the band — hence the renamed Giant Giant Sand — including a Mexican-American contingent that provides more direct connections to cumbia, bolero and mariachi. He also strung a story line through 19 songs, enough to subtitle the album “A Country Rock Opera” and to supply a detailed visual and psychological scenario in the liner notes.
It’s a tale of wanderings through surreal desert landscapes, of romance lost and found, of nature and fate and of the ways they all mirror one another: “You’re so much like the river, beautiful twisted and blue/You appear to be here forever, but really just passing through,” Mr. Gelb sings at the end of the album.
But the plot’s not the thing. The opera’s main character — described by Mr. Gelb as “a semi-grizzled man with overt boyish naïveté” — is the kind of existential drifter who’s been ambling through Mr. Gelb’s songs all these years, a figure (and singer) who ponders and aphorizes like Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash and Tom Waits. His route on “Tucson” is mostly a pretext for waltzes, rockabilly shuffles, quietly torchy ballads and bouncy Mexican cumbias.
A few songs are written or sung by other band members, notably Brian Lopez, who brings a tremulous croon to his own philosophizing in “Love Comes Over You,” and Lonna Kelley, who teases through the slinky, finger-snapping “Ready or Not,” wondering, “When the end of the world comes near, will you be ready?”.
Although the band is large, it doesn’t pile on all at once. Steel guitar, accordion, mariachi trumpet, lounge piano or a small string section are available as needed, but most of the music stays modest and intimate, staying out of the way of the graceful tunes and laconic thoughts. Mr. Gelb makes himself cozy in wide-open spaces.
JON PARELES
NEW YORK TIMES
GIANT GIANT SAND now includes Brian Lopez, Gabriel Sullivan and Jon Villa bringing their Mex-American plunk to the album with a permeating cumbia slant, A string duo from Aarhus, Denmark, (where the other Danes were coincidently from) Asger Christensen and Iris Jakobsen, who was also born in Tucson, and Lonna Kelley from Phoenix adorning the mic and Maggie Bjorklund leaning on the pedal steel from Copenhagen, together with the band from the last 10 years featuring Thøger T. Lund, Peter Dombernowski, Anders Pedersen, Nikolaj Heyman and Howe Gelb.