Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:  
Summary: One small step for us, one Giant leap for them.
Comment: We are so lucky at the moment with bands like Calexico, Fleet Foxes, Lambchop and Willard Grant Conspiracy all releasing amazing alt. albums, but you can now add Giant Sand to that list as they are back with `proVISIONS' surely the best record of their career to date. With 13 songs it glides effortlessly along broadening the horizons of the genre with unusual panache and grace. For me the only criticism I have is that the first half of the album is slightly weaker than the second despite collaborations with Isobel Campbell, Neko and Papa M but that said it is still breathtaking if not a bit too traditional. Then comes the P J Harvey cover `Desperate kingdom of love' a track that couldn't fit a band better and from this point on the music ascends until the end leaving the listener reaching again for the play button. It is on the last eight songs that band leader Howe Gelb has really taken the reigns and steered the album into uncharted water, experimenting with sounds and layered vocal patterns while still retaining a level of song writing charm that you'd expect from a grand master of the scene. Here each song has something extra, something more than the arrangement, the superb lyrics and the husky voice, it has hardly audible scratches, beeps and strange sounds that utilise the stereo causing your ears to dart from speaker to speaker trying to pick out what it is that's enhancing these compositions. And that's the thing you never quite know what's happening in the mix, underneath, sometimes you are even thinking that shouldn't work but brilliantly and unusually it does and that's what raises the bar. From the expected right through to the unexpected Giant Sand have produced a collection of songs that can hold a torch to anyone and as it gets better with repeated listens I'm wondering if this isn't one of the top albums of the year.
|
|
