Review by Patrick Foster
The Love Songs is the best Giant Sand album. By the time it, their fourth album, was ready to be recorded, leader Howe Gelb had assembled a rumbling band that was by turns sympathetic and powerful: his wife/bassist Paula Jean Brown, former Green on Red keyboardist Chris Cacavas, and drummer John Convertino, who would become Gelb's permanent beat-keeper. Thrown in with the strongest batch of songs Howe had ever written, the results were, as "Mountain of Love" puts it, "beautiful/well, there it is sometimes/like a rosebud on a sparkler." By this point, engineer and producer Eric Westfall had, with help from Gelb, mastered the art of capturing Giant Sand's sideways desert motion. Stone-cold Howe classics like "Wearing the Robes of Bible Black" leap from the speakers. Lyrically, Gelb had never written so evocatively: the lines of "Mountain of Love" and "Almost the Politician's Wife" flow with a kind of eloquence that actually approach prime Bob Dylan. The chord changes and tempo shifts that had been growing more and more distinctive in Gelb's writing feel perfect on The Love Songs. Even the closing cover of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller's "Is That All There Is" is infused with the kind of wistful maturity that comes from the confidence of a band who knows they've made a kind of masterpiece. All entries into the world of Giant Sand should begin here. The Homestead CD adds four cuts -- including a version of Rare Earth's "Get Ready that are not featured on other issues of the record, and play little part in the cohesive genius of the work.
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