Customer Reviews

Swerve

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Swerve is an album I have kept coming back to over the years and never been disappointed. Howe Gleb manages to create some desert ether with his garage band, Giant Sand. Beyond the two crazy bridges, this is a great collection of songs that become a unified composition. The upbeat Can't Find Love is great opener. My favorites are ballads Trickle Down System and Former(Not "Forever", as noted above) Version of Ourselves. Howe Gleb does a wonderful desert drenched version of Bob Dylan's Every Grain of Sand that's down right moving! Unfortunely, the creative bent of Howe Gleb has led to some hits and misses over the years: you can pass on Rant, but Swerve is a true masterpiece.

With an adoration for the bluesy rock of The Stones' "Exile On Main Street", and for the boys themselves, (not everybody can so easily name-check 'Sticky Fingers'), Giant Sand's "Swerve" is an offbeat alt-country collage of quirky pop effects, a perfectly unpolished guitar-string-snapping rhythm section, and the quest for the elusive butterfly of love, seen here as emotional money in the bank, which we're told in the first track, "Can't Find Love", can't be found "in ten minutes, not in a half of hour". There's an obligatory, eyeball in the headlights Dylan cover, (Every Grain of Sand), some '60s electric organ mini-jams, and a fine youth-forever philosophy of adult harboring of naked emotion in the country rock twang of "Trickle Down System", - "When we were younger/we were more like purveyors/perverse and purposeful and full of neglect/These days we've been reduced to surveyors/more severe, more soulful/and acutally capable of some respect." Yeah, I respect this. And the philosophy that people who live in sandcastles shouldn't make waves. Unless it's not a problem to float gently out to sea.