Confluence

One day, Howe Gelb will be remembered as a great, lost voice in American songwriting. Well, maybe not. More likely, his unique voice will remain lost for most people, despite amassing a catalog of incisive and expansive songs few contemporaries could touch. Ah, the cruel hand of pop culture. For those unfamiliar with Gelb’s left-field musings with his usual outfit, Giant Sand, imagine Neil Young whacked-out on peyote and left for dead in the Arizona desert. Though you can practically hear Crazy Horse galloping across the album’s stormy closer “Slide Away,” Confluence actually has a more ramshackle vibe than anything Young’s ever conjured. For all its musical looseness, though, this heavily acoustic effort is emotionally exacting. (“Would you make the meantime a little less mean?” he asks on the creeping “Saint Conformity.”) Gelb being the weird fucker he is, we have to endure the occasional experimental indulgence (“Vex (Paris)”), but it’s worth enduring. After all, without this sense of adventure, he’d just be another guy with a guitar and lots of time on his hands.