Critics accept that Arizona’s musical clown-mystic Howe Gelb is a cause worth fighting for, but his 30-year career contains enough disorientating stylistic lurches to dissuade curious onlookers from ever approaching him. Gigs are a game of Russian roulette. You enjoyed the stripped-down solo acoustic guitar album someone lent you, but arrive at the venue to witness an abstract solo piano instrumental set, a wilfully shambolic drums-and-guitar noise jam or an enormous, gospel-choir-augmented big band of the type traditionalists say they don’t make any more. Helpfully, Gelb is back with Giant Sand, his most famous incarnation, a country-rock collective now staffed largely by Danish players. Their new album races out of the traps on shuffling western-swing grooves layered with Gelb’s free-associated lyrics and truncated guitar scree. The Desperate Kingdom of Love suggests Lou Reed at a hotel-bar piano with Thelonious Monk. Pitch & Sway is a lucid fever dream, buoyed on plangent pedal steel. A new version of Romance of Falling, from 1991’s Ramp, treats it like a jazz standard, its streamlined chassis scuffed with surface noise and blurred, unresolved chords. This is Gelb’s most accessible album for a good long while. He is holding open the saloon door to his wonderful world of weirdness, but when the wind blows, it will slam shut once more. Hurry:don’t miss out on the next three decades.

Yep Roc YEP2188

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